THE NEW
CAMBRIDGE
MODERN HISTORY
l\ r WAR & PEACE
IN AN AGE OF
UPHEAVAL
1 79 V 1330
THE NEW
CAMBRIDGE MODERN HISTORY
ADVISORY COMMITTEE
G.N. CLARK J.R.M. BUTLER J.P.T.BURY
THE LATE E. A.BENIANS
VOLUME IX
WAR AND PEACE
IN AN AGE OF UPHEAVAL
i 793 _ i 8 3 °
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
THE NEW
CAMBRIDGE MODERN
HISTORY
VOLUME IX
WAR AND PEACE
IN AN AGE OF UPHEAVAL
1793-1830
EDITED BY
C. W. CRAWLEY
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE
LONDON • NEW YORK • MELBOURNE
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Published by the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 irp
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Library of Congress catalogue card number: 57-14935
isbn: o 521 04547 9
First published 1965
Reprinted 1969, 1974, 1975
Printed in Great Britain
at the University Printing House, Cambridge
(Euan Phillips, University Printer)
mraios 1 uitAJft
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
By C. W. Crawley, Emeritus and Honorary Fellow of Trinity Hall and formerly
Lecturer in History in the University of Cambridge
Some problems pages 1-3
Economic and social change 3-7
The political map 7-1 1
The political climate 11-13
Forms of government and constitutions 13-20
France and her influence 13-14
Prussia and Germany 14-16
Austria and Italy 16-17
Spain, Portugal and the smaller States 17-18
Russia 18-19
The Americas 19-20
International relations of governments 20-23
International conservatism and radicalism 23-26
Education and public opinion 26-28
Science and Technology 28-29
Religion and the Arts 29
The intuitive and the positivist spirit 29-30
CHAPTER II
ECONOMIC CHANGE IN ENGLAND AND EUROPE, 1780-1830
By R.M. Hartwell, Fellow of Nuffield College and Reader in recent Social
and Economic History in the University of Oxford
The growth of populations 31-33
Agriculture and food supply . 33-37
Communications 37-4®
England the ‘engine of growth’ 40-47
Industry 40-45
Commerce 45-46
International finance 46-47
Economic conditions in Europe generally 47-48
Italy, Spain, Russia, Austria, Scandinavia 48-52
Germany 52-53
The Netherlands 54-56
France 56-57
Combined effect of industrial and political change 57-59
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER III
ARMED FORCES AND THE ART OF WAR
A. ARMIES
By N. H. Gibbs, Fellow of All Souls College and Chichele Professor
of the History of War in the University of Oxford
‘The nation in arms’ more revolutionary than technical progress: Clausewitz pages 60-61
The French revolutionary and imperial armies 61-65
The Prussian revival 65-66
Size of armies 66-67
Weapons ............. 67
The roles of artillery, cavalry and infantry 67-74
Supplies 74-75
Napoleon’s personal role 75-76
B. NAVIES
By C. C. Lloyd, Formerly Professor of History at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich
New scale and decisiveness of warfare 76
British advantages: fighting and merchant navies; overseas bases . . . 77-78
The French navy 78-80
British naval administration 80-82
Ships and their armament 82-84
The supply and training of officers and seamen 84-86
Impressment, and the right of search; privateering 86-90
CHAPTER IV
REVOLUTIONARY INFLUENCES AND CONSERVATISM IN
LITERATURE AND THOUGHT
By H. G. Schenk, Fellow of Wolfson College and Senior Lecturer in European
Economic and Social History in the University of Oxford
Voices of welcome to liberty and fraternity 91-94
The idea of equality; the movement against slavery 95-99
Patriotism and nationalism; the romantic revulsion 99-104
The French emigres 104-05
de Maistre; Bonald; von Haller 105-07
The new revolutionary generation. Shelley and Byron 107-08
Reactions to industrial change 109-12
Saint-Simon. The early French socialistes 1 12-16
The issues presented by Lamennais 116-17
CHAPTER V
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
By C. C. Gillispie, Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, Princeton University
The transition from Enlightenment to Positivism : from Condillac to Comte . 118-19
French achievements in science and its organisation 119-26
The Inst it ut national and other institutions 1 19-21
The Fcole poly technique: a new spirit in education 121-23
The influence of Laplace and others 124-26
Napoleon’s ‘cultural imperialism’ 126
Berlin, and the German Universities 126-29
British empirical achievements. Russia and the United States .... 129-31
The golden age of analysis : mathematics and physics 131-34
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The way of experiment: laboratories pages 134-41
Chemistry and Physics 134-36
Biology: an organic or a physical science? 136-38
Cuvier and Lamarck 138-40
Geology 140-41
Technology: the links with pure science still slender 141-45
engineers and chemists 141-43
the iron industry; machine tools; dyes; heat engines 143-45
Electricity and the marriage of science with industry 145
CHAPTER VI
RELIGION : CHURCH AND STATE IN EUROPE AND THE AMERICAS
By John Walsh, Fellow of Jesus College , Oxford
Cross and Tricolour in France 146-54
From the Civil Constitution to systematic ‘dechristianisation’ . . . 146-47
The revolutionary cults and their symbolism 147-49
The separation between Church and State (1794-1802) .... 149-51
The Concordat between Napoleon and Pius VII (1800-2) .... 152-54
Secularisation in Germany (1803-6). Italian Concordat (1803) . . . 154-55
From Napoleon’s coronation to the Pope’s abduction (1804-9) • • • 155-57
Resistance by the clergy in Italy, Spain, Belgium and France .... 158-60
The religious revival. Romantic and other influences 160-63
Protestant confessionalism and pietism: on the Continent, in Britain and America 163-65
Problems of biblical history and authorship. Schleiermacher .... 167-69
Problems of ‘restoration’ in Catholic Europe and South America after 1815 169-72
From ‘throne and altar’ towards coexistence or separation .... 172-75
The conflict in France 175-76
Protestant variations in relations between Churches and the State . . . 176-77
The situation in England 177-78
CHAPTER VII
EDUCATION, AND PUBLIC OPINION
By John Roach, Professor of Education in the University of Sheffield and
Fellow of Corpus Christ l College, Cambridge
The ferment of vocal opinion: attempts to control it, and to form it . . 179-80
England: press, periodical and pamphlet 180-83
France: growing severity of controls over the press, 1793-1814 . . . 183-85
Central Europe: governments distrustful of popular sentiment a gains t Napoleon 185-87
The battles for the capture of opinion after 1815: in France .... 187-89
in Europe generally . . 190-92
Conflicts between liberal and idealist ways of thinking 192-93
Educational theories and practice : Pestalozzi, Robert Owen .... 193-95
Wilhelm von Humboldt: German Universities and schools .... 195-96
State controls over education: Germany, France and Russia .... 196-200
English experiments in education: the role of the Churches .... 201-03
European conflicts between Churches and the State in education . . . 203-06
Methods of teaching: Bell and Lancaster 206-07
The problem of the purpose of popular education 207-08
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER VIII
SOME ASPECTS OF THE ARTS IN EUROPE
A. THE VISUAL ARTS
By David Thomas, Former Lecturer in the Courtauld Institute of Art and
Assistant Director of Art, Arts Council of Great Britain
Painting pages 209-22
France ...... 209-16
England 216-20
Germany 220-21
Spain 221-22
Sculpture 222
Architecture 222-28
France 222-25
England 225-28
B. MUSIC
By F. W. Sternfeld, Fellow of Exeter College and Reader in Music
in the University of Oxford
The social role of music and its composers ....... 228-30
Haydn, and van Swieten 230-33
Beethoven: earlier works 233-38
Opera, and Beethoven’s Fidelia 238-42
Beethoven: later works 242-44
Schubert: the songs, and other works 245-49
CHAPTER IX
THE BALANCE OF POWER DURING THE WARS, 1793-1814
By Geoffrey B r u u n, formerly Professor of History, New York University
The powers in 1789: apparent weakness of France 250-52
Confused positions, 1789-93 252-54
The first coalition against France, 1793-7 254-55
The French in Egypt: the second coalition, 1798-1801 256-60
The Peace of Amiens and its rupture, 1801-3 260-64
Events leading to the third coalition and to its collapse, 1803-6 . . . 264-66
The Peace of Tilsit and the continental blockade, 1807-8 .... 268-69
French invasion of Spain, and defeat of Austria, 1808-10 .... 269-70
The breach with Russia and the tragedy of 1812 270-72
The victories of the Grand Alliance (fourth coalition), 1813-14 . . . 272-74
The Napoleonic hegemony in historical perspective 274
CHAPTER X
THE INTERNAL HISTORY OF FRANCE DURING THE WARS, 1793-1814
By Jacques Godechot, Professor of History in the University of Toulouse-
Le M trail and Honorary Dean of the Faculty of Letters
Interaction between internal politics and war 275-76
The Convention’s three phases 276-86
‘Girondin’ (21 September 1792 to 2 June 1793) 276-78
‘Revolutionary’ (2 June 1793 to 27 July 1794) 278-84
Government by Committees and the reign of Terror .... 279-81
The levee en masse, and economic controls ; the climax .... 281-84
‘Thermidorian’ (27 July 1794 to 31 October 1795) 284-86
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The Directory ........... pages 286-94
Constitution of the year III (1795) 286-88
The ‘first Directory’ (1795-7) 288-90
The ‘second Directory’ (1797-9) 290-93
The ‘third Directory’ (June to November 1799) 293-94
The coup d'etat of Brumaire (November 1799) 294-95
The Consulate: Bonaparte; institutions and legislation 295-99
From Consulate to Empire 299-302
Le Grand Empire : its scope and character; its downfall 302-06
CHAPTER XI
THE NAPOLEONIC ADVENTURE
By Felix Markham, Fellow of Hertford College and Lecturer in
Modern History in the University of Oxford
The Napoleonic Legend: origins and early career of Napoleon . . . 307-08
Italian and Egyptian campaigns 309-1 1
Character of Napoleonic warfare 311-13
Conduct of the Waterloo campaign 313-16
Personality of Napoleon 316-18
Methods of government 318-22
Relations with the Pope 322-23
Struggle with England 323-24
The Trafalgar campaign 325-26
The Continental System 326-30
The Napoleonic Empire 330-31
Policy in Italy, Germany and Spain. Attitude to Nationality .... 331-36
CHAPTER XII
FRENCH POLITICS, 1814-47
By G. de Bertier de Sauvigny, Professor in the Institut Catholique
de Paris , and in the University of Notre Dame, U.S.A.
The first Restoration and the constitutional Charter 337-40
The ‘hundred days’ and the second Restoration 340-43
The ‘chambre introuvable’ and its dissolution, 1815-16 343-44
The experiment with a middle-of-the-road government, 1816-20 . . . 344-47
The royalists in power 347-55
The last years of Louis XVHI, 1822-4 348-50
The first years of Charles X, 1824-7 350-53
The approach to a crisis, 1828-30 353-55
The revolution of July 1830, and the amended Charter 355-56
Organisation and character of Louis Philippe’s government .... 356-58
Royalist, Bonapartist and republican threats 358-60
Socialist and Catholic critics 360-61
Louis Philippe’s ministries to 1840 361-63
Guizot and the oppositions, 1840-7 364-66
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER XIII
GERMAN CONSTITUTIONAL AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT, 1795-1830
By W. H. Bruford, Formerly Fellow of St John's College and Emeritus Schroder
Professor of German in the University of Cambridge
Germany at the outbreak of the French Revolution .... pages 367-73
Reforms in Prussia, 1797-1806 373-76
Prussia after Jena: method of dealing with serfdom 376-78
reform of the administration 378-82
military reorganisation 382-85
A new spirit in Prussia: educational reforms 385-87
Reforms in Germany outside Prussia, to 1815 387-92
Germany after 1815 392-94
CHAPTER XIV
THE AUSTRIAN MONARCHY, 1792-1847
By C. A. Macartney, Formerly Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford
The Emperor Francis and the bureaucracy 395-400
Relations with Hungary, and the financial crisis 400-03
The difficult years after 1815: the Emperor Ferdinand (1835-48) . . . 403-06
Economic and social changes 406-07
National issues: Magyar, Slav, Italian, Polish, Bohemian .... 407-10
The Germans in the Monarchy 410-11
CHAPTER XV
ITALY, 1793-1830
By J. M. Roberts, Fellow and Tutor of Merton College and Lecturer
in Modern History in the University of Oxford
Italy on the eve of the invasion of 1796 4 t 2 -l 5
The French in Italy and the restoration of 1799-1800 415-20
The reorganisation of Italy by Napoleon 420-22
Economic effects of French domination 422-25
The effects on men’s minds 425-26
Sicily, 1806-14: Murat and Italy, 1813-15 426-28
The restorations in Italy 428-30
Revolutionary movements after 1815 431-35
Significance of the period in Italian history 435-37
A note on the main territorial changes in Italy, 1793-1814 .... 438
chapter XVI
SPAIN AND PORTUGAL, 1793 to c. 1840
By Raymond Carr, Warden of St Antony's College and formerly Professor of
the History of Latin America in the University of Oxford
The Enlightenment, the aristocracy and the Church 439-41
The middle classes. Agrarian conditions 441-43
Feebleness in foreign policy, 1789-1808: Godoy 443-44
National and popular resistance to France 444-45
The Cortes and die Constitution of 1812 445-46
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Patriots and Afrancesados in Spain pages 446-47
Reaction and revolutionary movements after 1814 447-49
The Revolutions of 1820-23 in Spain and Portugal 449-52
Popular royalism and moderate liberalism to 1833 452-55
Moderates and Progressives in Spain, 1833-40 455-58
The soldier-politicians 458-59
The defeat of Carlism and Miguelism 459-61
CHAPTER XVII
THE LOW COUNTRIES AND SCANDINAVIA
A. THE LOW COUNTRIES
By J. A. van Houtte, Professor in the Faculty of Letters in the
University of Louvain
Conservative and democratic Patriots 462-64
The French in Belgium (to 1796) 464-65
The Batavian Republic (to 1798) 465-66
Political resignation and economic development in Belgium (1797-1813) . . 466-69
Dutch reactions to assimilation and annexation; the restoration (1798-1814) . 469-72
The kingdom of the United Netherlands created (1814-15) .... 472-73
Difficulties of amalgamation 473-78
Conflict with the Belgian Church 473-76
Attempt to ‘dutchify’ Belgium 476-77
William I, the ‘merchant king’ 477-78
Union of oppositions in Belgium (1828-30) 478-79
Reasons for the failure of amalgamation 479-8o
B. SCANDINAVIA
By T.K. Derry, formerly Taberdar of The Queen’s College, Oxford
The Armed Neutrality (1780-3), and the Swedish conflict with Russia (1788-90) 480-81
Scandinavia on the eve of the revolutionary age 481-83
The effects of the wars upon Scandinavia (to 1808) 484-87
The succession question in Sweden and the loss of Finland .... 487-88
Distress in Norway 488-89
Sweden at war, and in affiance, with Britain (1810-14) 489-90
The incorporation of Norway in Sweden 490-91
Scandinavian institutions and culture after the wars. Finland .... 491-94
CHAPTER XVIII
RUSSIA, 1789-1825
By J.M.K. Vyvyan, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge
Extent and population of the Empire: prevalence of serfdom .... 495-97
Industry and trade 497-98
The nobles : privileged, but subservient to the Crown 498-500
Reactions to the French Revolution. Novikov and Radishchev . . . 500-01
Catherine II and Paul I. Alexander’s early experiences 501-06
The young Emperor Alexander I and the ‘unofficial committee’ of his friends . 507-09
Administrative and legislative reforms 509-11
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The Polish question and the ascendancy of France pages 51 1-12
Speranskii’s constitutional, financial and legal projects (1808-12) . . . 512-14
The reaction against France and the war of 1812 514-16
The ‘Congress’ Kingdom of Poland (1815) 516-17
Alexander I and Arakcheev: the military colonies 517-19
Origins of the Decembrist conspiracy, and its suppression .... 519-21
The reign of Alexander I: military and diplomatic prestige; economic growth . 521-24
CHAPTER XIX
THE NEAR EAST AND THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE, 1798-1830
By C.W. Crawley
Europe and the Near East 5 2 5 _2 7
Islam and the Ottoman Empire 527-29
Egypt and its neighbours: Muhammad Ali 529-34
The Adriatic and Illyria 534-36
The Danubian Principalities (Roumania) 536-40
Rumelia (Bulgaria) 540-41
Serbia 54 I_ 44
Greece: the revival 544-47
the War of Independence 547-5®
The Peace of Adrianople (1829) S50-5 1
CHAPTER XX
EUROPE’S RELATIONS WITH SOUTH AND SOUTH-EAST ASIA
By K. A. Ballhatchet, Professor of the History of South Asia in the
University of London
Prevailing confidence in Western ideas and methods for India .... 552-53
Expansion of Company rule in India: subsidiary alliances .... 553-58
British footholds in Malaya, Ceylon, Burma 558-60
Problems of administration and land-settlement 560-63
in India 560-65
The British in Ceylon. The Dutch in Java 563-65
The Company losing commercial privileges 565
The Company and social change: missionaries and education .... 565-69
European interest in Indian culture 569-71
CHAPTER XXI
EUROPE’S ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL RELATIONS WITH TROPICAL
AFRICA
By J.D. Fage, Director of the Centre of West African Studies and Professor
of African History in the University of Birmingham
Limited development of strategic and commercial interests .... 572-74
South Africa, and the east coast 574-77
Commerce and the West African slave trade 577-78
The effects of abolition 579-82
Exploration of the interior; missionary activity 582-84
Political involvement on the coasts : Britain, France 584-86
South Africa under British rule 586-87
Livingstone: Central and East Africa 587-90
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER XXII
THE UNITED STATES AND THE OLD WORLD, 1794-1828
By F. Thistlethwaite, Vice-Chancellor of the University of East Anglia
and formerly Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge
John Quincy Adams and the Republican posture pages 591-93
Population, boundaries and an open frontier 593-95
Cotton and the Atlantic economy 595-98
Manufactures and ‘the American System’ 598-602
Sectional Politics 602-07
The Constitution in practice 607-10
A republican nation 610-1 1
CHAPTER XXIII
THE EMANCIPATION OF LATIN AMERICA
By R. A. Humphreys, O.B.E., Professor of Latin American History
in the University of London
The French in the Peninsula (1807-8) 612-13
Civil strife in Spanish America — loyalism, autonomy or independence? . . 613-18
Disintegration of the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata (18 1 0-16) . . . 618-21
Bolivar in the north and San Martin in Chile (1 81 1-1 8) 621-23
Events leading to Bolivar’s ascendancy (1815-22) 623-26
Bolivar’s triumphs and despair (1823-30) 627-28
Reconstruction in Spanish America 628-30
Brazil— Portuguese colony; kingdom; empire (1807-31) 630-33
The Spanish Islands and Central America (1810-24) 633-36
The roles of Britain and of the United States 636-38
chapter XXIV
THE FINAL COALITION AND THE CONGRESS OF VIENNA, 1813-15
By E. V. Gulick, Elisabeth Hodder Professor of History,
Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts
Castlereagh’s Instructions (October 1813), and the negotiations at Chatillon
The Allies in Paris and the Bourbon Restoration (March-April 1814)
The first Peace of Paris (30 May 1814)
The Netherlands and other problems in the Summer of 1814 .
Sovereigns and ministers at Vienna: organisation of the Congress
The conflict over Poland and Saxony (October-December, 1814)
The deadlock resolved (December 1 814-January 1815) .
The settlement of Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia .
The settlement of Italy and Switzerland
The Acte finale (9 June 1815). The slave trade and other problems .
The ‘hundred days’ and the second Bourbon restoration.
The second Peace of Paris (20 November 1815)
The Quadruple Alliance and the Holy Alliance
Review of the settlement: the balance of power
The roles of the leading statesmen
xiii
639-41
642-43
644- 45
645- 46
646- 48
648-54
654-55
656- 57
657- 58
658- 59
659- 61
661-63
663
664-65
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER XXV
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, 1815-30
By C.W. Crawley
Issues arising from the 1815 settlement. Personal and national postures
General desire for a balance of power. Conferences of Great Powers
Alexander I: ‘Holy Alliance’ or ‘General Alliance’ (1815-19) .
Unrest in Italy, Germany and European Turkey (1819) ....
Plans for collective intervention against revolutions ....
Condemned by Britain in Spain and Portugal (1820) ....
Single Austrian intervention in Italy approved (1820-1)
Efforts to isolate Russo-Turkish disputes from the Greek question (1821-3)
The Spanish colonies, and the French intervention in Spain (1822-3) •
Spanish America, Britain, the United States and the European Alliance .
Brazil, Portugal and Britain
The Greek question
A dilemma for both Russia and Britain (1823-5)
Russia, Britain and France allied (1826-7)
The battle of Navarino and the Russo-Turkish war (1827-9)
A balance of power preserved by varying methods
pages 668
. 669-70
. 670-73
• 673-74
• 674-77
• 674-75
• 675-77
• 677-79
. 679-81
. 681-84
. 684-85
. 685-89
. 685-87
. 687-88
. 688-89
. 689-90
Appendix: Note on the French Republican Calendar 691-92
Index
693
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CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
A n age so full of dramatic reversals of fortune and so big with con-
sequences as that of 1793 to 1830 may seem to defy any attempt to
^compose in one volume a survey of Europe and some of its links
with distant regions. Yet the very effort to survey the field in per-
spective, astride the ‘natural frontier’ of 1815, presents a challenge and
provokes questions sometimes obscured. This volume is intended to
offer a portrait or survey rather than a compressed record. Stirring
episodes, locally decisive battles, commanding personalities may receive
no more than passing mention or may even be sought in vain in the
index. But the problem of compression is not the only or the most
interesting one. More surprising is the uncertainty about some of the
foundations. There is still plenty of room for debate. The printed re-
cords are bulkier than for the eighteenth century, but many of them
relate to kaleidoscopic changes, blurred for us by political scene-shift-
ing and by the fog of war. Moreover, the voices of articulate con-
temporaries were more strident, more at cross-purposes with each other,
than in the apparently calm and confident age before 1789, more even
than in the short period when the Revolution in its first stages seemed,
not only in French eyes, to signify clearly a few universal principles
applicable to all Europe and perhaps to all mankind. On the other
hand, in the following period after 1830, aptly described as the
zenith of European power (Vol. X), the records, though even bulkier,
were becoming more systematic, and the basic social data were either
more regularly collected or at least collected in ways more capable of
statistical analysis.
In spite of recent efforts to test sweeping assertions by detailed
sampling, many central questions about this age of wars and revolutions
in Europe are still not precisely answered. How exactly was the wide-
spread growth of population connected with some fall in the rate of
mortality and with increases in food supply or in commercial and
industrial activity? What was the balance-sheet for ‘liberated’ peoples,
materially and in their own generation, between release from old
obligations and violent subjection to spoliation by new armies and new
officials? How many men fought in the wars, how many of them died
by battle or disease, and how many just disappeared as deserters ? Could
any general statement be made about the effect of compulsory military
service in the field upon the outlook of thousands of survivors who were
not disabled, or did individuals react to it as variously as to any other
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WAR AND PEACE IN AN AGE OF UPHEAVAL
experience in life? Was the peace-settlement at Vienna just an episode
in power politics, or did the attempt to stabilise it foreshadow a lasting
change in the conduct of international relations? Did the hostility
between the French Republic and traditional religion help or hinder the
survival of each? How far did Napoleon’s treatment of the Pope
effectively, through the clergy, alienate masses of people from the
imperial regime towards the end ? And what were the long-term effects
of these conflicts upon Church and State alike? Did they indeed reflect
irreconcilable differences between religious and secular philosophies,
or did they rather spring from the fact that the higher clergy were in
1789 almost everywhere so inextricably embedded in the old social
order that the Churches were still only beginning to disentangle them-
selves from it around 1830? Such questions might be multiplied.
The fall of Napoleon has often been a watershed for historians whose
special field of study either reaches from 1789 (rather than 1793) to
1815 or else leads on from 1815 to 1848 (rather than 1830). Either peace
becomes a preface and an epilogue or else the wars are only the back-
ground. It may be held that the ‘unsullied’ and truly significant ideas of
1789 would best be studied in the previous volume, while the enduring
consequences of the great upheaval are revealed more clearly in the
succeeding one: in short, that the period from 1793 to 1830 is only the
filling of a sandwich, unevenly spread with violent stimulants and
artificial tranquillisers. Yet a sandwich has no flavour without its filling.
It has been said that from 1789 to 1815 France ‘made war on history’,
and also that after 1815 the conservative alliance tried to ‘put back the
clock’. If so, both attempts were bound to fail; but the contrast is of
course much over-simplified. The claims of tradition began to mingle
with those of innovation very early in the first period; and, conversely,
many conservatives after 1815 understood that history, on which it was
dangerous to make war, included the history of the ‘enlightenment’,
and now that of the past thirty years too. The metaphor of the clock is
not really very apt, for it suggests a regularity which restoration govern-
ments might be excused for not recognising in the ‘parties of movement’
at that time. They saw themselves as trying rather to lower a feverish
pulse of revolutionary conquest than to put back a clock of progress.
Their diagnosis and their remedies were often crude, but during these
years a process was going on of filtering and digesting rather than
totally rejecting the mixed fare with which a whole generation had
been forcibly fed.
This age of wars and their immediate aftermath has a character of its
own, even if it is not that of fulfilment. Apart from its dramatic
qualities, it presents us with the question whether we are to see in it,
prevailingly, ideas at the mercy of violence or violence in the service of
ideas, and with the problem of the role of war itself in shaping the
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INTRODUCTION
direction of change and determining its extent. Technically, this was
not a revolutionary age in warfare by land or sea (Chapter III); but the
scale and persistence of warfare, and the methods used to meet these
conditions (conscription, blockade, fiscal devices, propaganda) were
ominously capable of much greater exploitation in future. Some
chapters in this volume may help to bridge the barrier of 1815, and this
may be salutary even if nobody would pretend to erect new barriers in
1793 or in 1830. The choice of a period which begins with a state of
general war on the execution of Louis XVI, and ends with the avoidance
of war on the abdication of Charles X, echoes the preoccupation of
Europe with France in that age, and possibly also marks a stage in the
inoculation of Europe to internal revolutions. Later revolutionary
changes have mostly been initiated during or after wars and have not
directly caused wars by intervention from outside.
In Chapter II some facts and figures are presented which mark the
changing economic structure, together with an estimate of the forces
which were changing it, rapidly in England, but unevenly and even still
obscurely on the continent. The connection of these changes with
political developments is indicated in chapters on the several countries.
In retrospect, the most striking fact was the continued, accelerated and
almost universal growth of population — a process not everywhere open
to accurate measurement and still not fully explained. All over Europe
agriculture still predominated, overwhelmingly in the south and east
and much of the centre. The age of farm machinery was not yet, and
the pattern of life in the country was everywhere traditional. Yet
changes in methods, though not dramatic, were various, widespread and
cumulative; yields were improved, crops were more varied and markets
were becoming less local. It seems difficult to place in any definite
order of cause and effect three concurrent facts — rising prices, more
food, more mouths to feed.
Communications, too, were traditional, but again with a difference.
Governments could now use the semaphore system in clear weather
for signalled messages between important centres. Some roads were
better, and passage over these was quicker and smoother for mails, for
officials and for travellers who could afford it; but merchandise hardly
moved faster by road than before. Some waterways were improved,
and in a few industrial regions a web of new canals meant something
like a local revolution in transport. In the twenties, the use of steam in
harbours and for coast-wise shipping had begun. In and around some
mines, the stationary steam engine for pumping water, and the horse-
drawn railway truck, were already separately fa mili ar before 1790;
by 1830 the steam-locomotive, marrying the engine to the railway, was
a proved experiment and was certain to go further and faster. The long
haul for passengers or freight was still untried, and even in 1837
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Parisians seem to have regarded as little more than a new toy their first
suburban passenger fine, just opened to St Germain; but five years
earlier the Globe carried articles prophesying that steam would not only
obliterate ocean barriers and barriers between oceans (Suez and Central
America) but also reduce the frontiers between nations to mere
municipal boundaries (Vol. X, pp. 434-5).
The same optimism was expressed by some writers as to the levelling
of barriers between nations and between classes that would accompany
the expansion of commerce with its attendant division of labour and re-
distribution of resources in the most economical way. Industrialists
themselves were more apt to fix their attention on securing protected
markets within the reach of their own government’s influence; they
favoured breaking down protective walls only if their own home markets
were too small, or if their own methods of production were so far in
advance of their neighbours’ that they had, for a time, little to fear
from foreign competition as a result of reciprocally freer trade. It was
natural that English manufacturers should try by every means to
penetrate the self-blockade imposed on the Continent by Napoleon,
and to take advantage, when peace came, of the expected opportunity
to flood the continental market. It was equally natural that French and
Belgian industrialists, lately accustomed to having an open market
over half the Continent, should seek protection after 1815 against this
flood, and they were not slow in securing it. Yet the big start enjoyed
by British coal, iron and textiles was not in the long run a threat but a
stimulus to industrial change in Europe.
It is impossible to summarise the evidence for Britain’s lead or the
discussion of some of the explanations for it (Chapter II, pp. 39-43).
In any case, the lead was already established before 1790; what needs
explaining in this period is that it was maintained and even increased.
Other countries were not lacking in inventiveness — science and tech-
nology were given more official recognition in France than elsewhere —
nor lacking in commercial or industrial enterprise. But, if no country
was so continuously at war as was Britain, most countries suffered
greater dislocation by war when it came, and greater uncertainty about
the future. To catch up quickly with Britain, they needed much more
financial stability than they ever achieved during the wars. Whatever
the combination of reasons may be, it would be wrong to speak of an
industrial revolution in Europe before 1830, except in Belgium and in a
few but important French and other scattered centres. Some govern-
ments were in no hurry to promote industries which might disturb the
social order (as in Vienna and Rome). Most were still mercantilist
rather than industrial in their policies, even if academic economists were
almost everywhere disciples of Adam Smith and J. B. Say. Only one
ruler, Muhammad Ah in Egypt, was experimenting, not very happily,
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INTRODUCTION
in development of commerce and industry by thorough-going state
monopolies intended to finance his army and navy. Although govern-
ments were usually keen to encourage new sources of wealth and
revenue, they might well be concerned about the social consequences of
headlong change and sudden fluctuations arising from the introduction
of the new machines, especially in the manufacture of textiles. Tradi-
tional craftsmen could not be expected to see the virtues of new methods
which might throw them out of work and replace them by women and
children as minders of machines in factories. They might resort to
violence like the Luddites, or become helplessly dependent on public or
private charity. Country people, crowding into cities growing faster than
their housing, might be affected in health or morals and might easily
become destitute during a commercial slump. One of the earliest
detailed studies of these conditions outside Britain was made in 1829
by a conservative and Catholic prefet 1 of whom Louis XVIII had said
that he wished he had such a man for every department. He was not,
like some royalists, a romantic advocate of a return to the old guilds and
corporations, nor a critic of manufacturers from social prejudice, but
he was shocked as an administrator. In France, relief of poverty had
been regarded largely as a work for the Church, and there was nothing
like the tradition of public assistance from local rates that had followed
the dissolution of the monasteries in England in the sixteenth century.
That system was now under fire in England, and in any case the survival
or revival of charitable religious orders in France after 1790 could not
cope any better than the old English poor-law with problems arising
unpredictably in rapidly growing centres of population. The prevailing
school of economists sincerely believed that attempts to moderate the
speed of change or smooth the transition would only prolong the agony
and delay the eventual distribution of the fruits of ever-growing opulence
over the whole people. Soon, in the i830’s, Louis-Philippe’s ministers
were to be studying, with the help of the English economist Nassau
Senior, the new English poor-law of 1834. It was not until 1839 that
Prussia did something to mitigate the evils of children’s labour in
factories, on lines that had already been traced in England from 1801
but with effective inspection only after 1833.
One mechanical invention threatened in this age to create a more
than temporary problem for a nation and even for its civilisation: Eli
Whitney’s cotton-ginning device directly caused an extension of the slave
trade (Chapter XXI), and of slavery in the United States, as startling as
the leap in production that went with it. And this happened at the
moment when both the trade and the institution were being condemned
by the French Constituent Assembly in the name of reason and natural
1 F.P.A. de Villeneuve-Bargemont, Economic politique chretienne, ou recherches sur la
nature des causes du pauperisme. ... 3 vols. (Paris, 1 834). Based on a report made in 1 829.
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rights, by philanthropists in the name of humanity and, most effectively
in England, by zealous Christians in the name of religion. In the long
run, economic arguments were to chime with the others in predicting
the decline of slavery; but in this age the impetus came from men who
were insisting that right should prevail in spite of private vested interests
or national economic gain.
Some of the fluctuations in industry were due to changes in fashion or
in the tariff policies of governments, or to transitions between war and
peace; but many were caused, or their violence was increased, by the
difficulties of both state and private banks in coping with any sudden
crisis of confidence. These problems were very far from solved, and the
potentially stabilising influence of great financial houses was seen not
so much in commerce and industry as in transactions with governments,
legitimate and revolutionary. Ouvrard, the most spectacular of the
fournisseurs (army contractors), had big contracts with the Directory
and was alternately employed and imprisoned by both Napoleon and the
restored Bourbons. His own larger schemes for financing governments
were too speculative to make for stability; but after 1815 there were
moments when both the Bourbons in France and some of the South
American republics may have owed their survival to foreign bankers,
whose profits were commensurate with the political risks. Mettemich
acknowledged his own and his emperor’s debt to the House of Roth-
schild by supporting in the German Diet an improvement in the status of
the Frankfurt Jews (1817) and by helping to secure the title of baron for
all five Rothschild brothers (1822).
Measured by every economic test, Britain emerged from the wars as
the richest and most stable of the great states of the world — with London
as the great international centre for banking and insurance, with the
most powerful navy protecting the largest number of merchant ships,
which in turn carried the most varied commerce all over the world, in-
cluding the swelling output of the first modern industrial revolution
and the primary produce of her expanding empire overseas. At the
same time, British agriculture, partly protected by the corn laws from
the possible effect of peace upon prices, could boast of high farming as
well as high rent-rolls. The farm labourer shared even less than the
unskilled factory worker or the ordinary seaman in all this prosperity,
but perhaps few of these would have been pleased to change places
with their counterparts on the continent; and the engineering artisans
of the mechanical age were a new class of men, numerous enough
already in England to be conscious of their importance, and made
more aware of it by the demand for their services abroad. Josiah
Wedgwood had great difficulty in persuading his skilled potters not to
be tempted by glittering offers of employment on the continent. No
wonder that the spirit of enterprise would soon be matched in England
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INTRODUCTION
by a general spirit of complacency; many were completely left behind
in the race, but most economists and men of substance believed that this
was the price of progress. Britain had been more fortunate than most
other countries in tackling the problem of a balance between liberty and
authority; she was faced, earlier than others, with that of creating a
balance between over-all economic progress, as measured by statistical
averages, and those hardships of individuals, groups and even classes,
which would be concealed in works like Porter’s Progress of the Nation
but must fill the whole horizon for those who had to endure them
throughout their lives. In short, the upward surge in production of
wealth was not yet matched by much skill in regulating its pace or dis-
tributing its material benefits so as to promote stability. Nor was much
attention yet paid by ‘practical’ men to these problems, which therefore
became the happy hunting ground of Utopian or fanciful men like
Charles Fourier. The acuteness and relevance of many points in their
diagnosis was obscured by the ridicule showered upon the quaintness
of some of their remedies. Much more effective, up to a point, was the
demonstration by Robert Owen at New Lanark that in certain condi-
tions successful business could be married to humane considerations.
In 1830-1, the political map of Europe was surprisingly like that of
forty years earlier. French conquests proved to be as impermanent as
they had been dramatic, and few traces remained of French experiments
like the Kingdom of (northern) Italy, the Confederation of the Rhine or
the Saxon Duchy of Warsaw. The frontiers of France itself were
almost the same as before, and so were the outer lines which enclosed
the states of Germany. If Italy was still only a ‘ geographical expression
it was not differently bounded ; the disappearance of the proud republics,
Venice and Genoa, was the most radical change that survived the war.
Spain and Portugal had lost most of their overseas empires, but their
own frontiers were unchanged. The outward shape of Switzerland was
hardly altered, and the newly united Kingdom of the Netherlands was
breaking up into nearly the same two components that had been
familiar on the map for more than 200 years. In the north, Sweden had
lost Finland to Russia (1809) and gained Norway from Denmark (1815),
but these were transfers of areas that had long been dependent and did
not lose their identity by a change of sovereign; and Sweden was merely
recognising the end of an era when she failed to recover in 1815 her last
small foothold across the Baltic in Pomerania. Within Germany, an
old and decayed framework which had for centuries been too rotten to
bear renovation, though it might still give a little shelter, had suddenly
collapsed at the touch of Napoleon. The Germans were by no means
ready for political unification, for their think ers and reformers mostly
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combined soaring universal ideas with an extremely limited, often
parochial, outlook in current politics; but nothing could reverse the
radical change of 1803-6, by which the big fish had swallowed up most
of the smaller fry, so that Austria and Prussia, in their potential rivalry
for domination, were confronted by a manageable collection of less
than forty states instead of more than 300.
Austria, more securely based than ever outside Germany, with her
apparently unshakable hold on northern Italy and the opposite Adriatic
coastlands, planned to prevail in Germany (at least in foreign policy),
not by direct rule or by reviving an elective imperial title which she had
agreed to discard as obsolete in 1806, but by the kind of influence that
she also exerted in central and southern Italy, and by her presidency of
the new Germanic Confederation. Prussia, on the other hand, radically
dismembered by Napoleon after Jena and compensated fully but
differently in 1815, could only hope to prevail by further direct acquisi-
tions or by very close control. Her provinces consisted of a large eastern
block, thinning out to the west, and a smaller western block, the two
separated by Hanover, Brunswick and Hesse in a belt nowhere less
than 30 miles wide and mostly much more. She had problems of
reinstatement in those parts of her shares in the partitions of Poland
that she recovered in 1 8 1 5, after losing them in 1 806 before they had been
fully digested; problems, too, of new rule in the northern part of
Saxony, and in a large Rhineland province made up of former ecclesi-
astical and secular principalities which had all undergone the direct
influence of France. Many of these new Prussian subjects were Roman
Catholics; like the Silesians (now Prussians of the third generation),
they were not readily absorbed into a Lutheran-Calvinist state which
until the time of Frederick the Great had never since the Reformation
been diplomatically represented at the Vatican. A government which
could in 1817, by royal decree, make an administrative union between
the Lutheran and Calvinist Churches in Prussia (Chapter VI, pp. 176-7),
would not find it easy to treat the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the same
brusque fashion.
Nobody dreamed in 1815 of restoring the political map of old
Germany; and, even if Rome publicly deplored the injustice of secularis-
ing the great ecclesiastical principalities (Cologne, Mainz and Trier had
provided three of the seven or eight Electors to the imperial title), yet
the Pope’s secretary of state, Cardinal Pacca, had not failed to recognise
that they would, if restored, be an embarrassment rather than an asset,
embedded as they had been in the aristocratic social order, with
privileges which Rome was beginning to see as an obstacle to the unity
and discipline of the Church. The German bishops had lately been
inclined to Josephist ideas of a national state church, but ‘if they are
less rich and powerful they will lend a more willing ear to the voice of
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INTRODUCTION
Rome’. 1 But neither Rome nor her friends were yet ready to consider
whether her own temporal power in Italy (other than a necessary
pied-a-terre ) might soon be an embarrassment too : the bulk of the papal
states was restored almost without question in 1814.
Russia’s apparently formidable resources had been swollen in all
directions. Finland was a small but strategically important gain. The
Congress Kingdom of Poland (1815) embraced the Austrian and
Prussian shares in the partition of 1795, and about half the Prussian
share in that of 1793, while the whole of the Russian shares remained
within Russia. Until 1831, the kingdom was not yet fully part of Russia :
it was separated by a customs frontier and it had a national army whose
commander-in-chief, the tsar’s brother Constantine, refused in 1828-9
to send any Polish troops for the war on Turkey; but other powers were
virtually excluded from any influence there, and Polish patriots were
very soon to provide the excuse for a harsher policy of Russification.
In the south, Russia now planned, by necessity more than by choice, to
preserve Turkey in Europe as a weakened and dependent client rather
than directly to advance her own frontier on that side. But in 1812 she
had annexed Bessarabia (a part of Moldavia), and the Treaty of
Adrianople (1829) was the last of a long series which completed the
administrative separation of Wallachia and Moldavia from Con-
stantinople; whatever the eventual fate of these ‘Danubian Princi-
palities’ — the future Roumania — might be, a Russian army was in
occupation until 1834. On the Asiatic side of the Black Sea, Russia’s
European allies could not so easily impede her expansion — at the
expense of Turkey in the Caucasus (1801) and in Armenia (1829), and
of Persia around the Caspian Sea (18x3, 1828). Her gradual penetration
through Siberia had continued to the eastern sea; in 1799 the tsar
granted a monopoly to a ‘ Russian- American Company’ to control
existing and future settlements (mostly for seal-fur) on both sides of the
Bering Sea. Conventions with the United States (1824) and with Britain
(1825) defined the southern boundary of the Alaskan settlements at
54 0 40': and the Company’s settlement much further south, in San
Francisco Bay, was not formally liquidated until 1839. But difficulties
of supply, friction with other powers, and mismanagement fit was fine
to be a director, but very dangerous to be a stockholder’), were already
by 1830 disappointing any hopes of a great future in this region. The
Company lingered on until the sale of Alaska to the United States in
1867. 2
For Turkey, the direct cessions to Russia had been less alarming
than in the time of Catherine II. Even the restrictions on sovereignty
1 J. Schmidlin, Papstgeschichte der neuesten Zeit, (1800-46), 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1933),
vol. 1, p. 207, n. 5.
2 S. B. Okun, The Russian-American Company, English translation. (Harvard, 1951.)
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in the Principalities were tolerable, for these were hardly made as yet in
response to an effective Roumanian national movement. Much more
ominous for the future were the facts that the sultan had been obliged
to allow a real autonomy to the Serbs (1817) and to recognise the
existence of a small but ambitious Greek kingdom (1830). And,
although Mahmud II had some success in tightening his control over
his Asiatic provinces, he was now no more than a nominal suzerain in
Egypt. Yet the long northern frontier in Europe was unchanged, and all
the European powers paid at least lip service to the principle of the
‘independence and integrity’ of the Ottoman Empire (Chapter XIX).
If the frontiers of Russia and Turkey reached far outside Europe,
those of British rule had been mightily extended, far beyond the reach
of Napoleon. At the nearest point, the legislative Union of Ireland with
Great Britain (1801) hardly affected the political map, though its in-
direct cause was the war and the influence of the Revolution on the
rising of 1798. The genuine prospect of a healing effect was clouded by a
long delay in granting the expected political rights to the Roman
Catholics (1829), and the redress of agrarian grievances was hardly yet
being considered. Time was to show the full unhappy effect of the union
on British domestic politics, and also on the reputation of Britain in
Europe and the United States; already Mettemich had been countering
Canning’s arguments for Greece by reference to Ireland; and belief in
Palmerston’s sincerity as a champion of national and liberal causes was
not to be enhanced by the fact that he was an Irish landlord. Neverthe-
less, the enthusiasm of Belgian (and some French) Catholics for
O’Connell’s successful new method of agitation was indirectly a tribute
to the fact that British institutions were adaptable enough eventually to
respond to opinion or bow to necessity.
Britain’s sea power was much reinforced: in European waters by
possession of Malta (1800) and Heligoland (1815), and by occupation of
the Ionian Islands (1815-64) as a ‘Septinsular Republic’, with complete
strategic control over this protectorate; along the approaches to India,
by footholds and treaties at the mouth of the Red Sea and in the
Persian Gulf (Chapter XIX), or again by her possession of the Cape
Province and the islands of Ascension and Mauritius (1815); and still
further east, by the acquisition of Ceylon (1815), Singapore and
the Straits Settlements (1819), and by the gradual development of her
recent settlements in Australia. The spectacular growth of British
power in India is described in Chapter XX. Across the Atlantic, short-
lived hopes during the wars of footholds in South America were
abandoned before the peace, but a part of Dutch Guiana gave Britain
one small colony south of the Isthmus (1815). The war with the United
States (1812-14) produced no change in the frontier with Canada, and
the way was open for settling (1818) an artificial but stable boundary
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INTRODUCTION
westwards to the Rockies before settlement had proceeded far on both
sides of it. Britain’s West Indian islands, with the addition of Trinidad,
St Lucia and Tobago (1815), were strategically important to her in fore-
stalling unwelcome schemes of European powers in Central or South
America — and they were indirectly valuable to the United States also
while its own navy was still weak. Commercially, the startling expansion
of Britain’s trade with the United States after the separation, and soon
the more speculative but substantial growth of her exchanges with South
America, meant that the West Indies were not so much as of old the hub
of Atlantic trade; but, still in 1830, they were more important to Britain
than India was as yet, and their own trade with the United States,
restricted since 1783, had just been made easier by British legislation
(Chapter XXII).
Thus, broadly speaking, the age presents a contrast in political map-
making. Within Europe, the bewildering changes of the war years left
comparatively few traces and, except in Germany, and to a lesser extent
in Italy, did not point clearly along the lines that were to be followed in
the next half-century. In the outer world, great changes were also seen,
but most of them were more permanent or led on to further changes in
the same general direction (India, Malaya, Australasia, South Africa,
North and South America). But the force of the French explosion is
not to be measured in Europe by its effects on the map. Even though a
balance of power was achieved in 1815 along lines foreshadowed by
Pitt at least ten years earlier (Chapter XXIV), and even though several
fallen dynasties were restored, yet ‘restoration’ is a misleading des-
cription in all other respects for the condition of Europe after 1815.
Much of what the French, and the wars, did to Europe, by direct action
or by the stimulus of provocation, proved to be irreversible. The genera-
tion after 1815 is usually said to have lived in a period of reaction,
associated with the name of Mettemich. It is true that there was a
strong reaction against ‘irregular’ governments, and some attempt to
link government not with experiment or opportunity but with tradi-
tional supports. But some of this goes back to 1799 or earlier, to Burke
and his admirers, to the quick disillusionment of the intellectuals in the
1790’s, to the young de Maistre and Bonald, and to General Bonaparte
recalling and employing emigres and ordering a Te Deum of thanks-
giving in Milan Cathedral for French victories in Italy (1800) — a
gesture which shocked some members of the Directory and led on by
stages to the Concordat (April 1802) and all that it seemed to imply.
With the Consulate and Empire, the brief age of the revolution militant
began to look like an interlude between systems of continuous power
relying in part upon tradition for their stability. On the other hand, most
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of the administrative and social changes that were made effective before
1815 survived, while those which had only been initiated did not lose
their impetus. None of the rulers of this generation would have been
described as ‘reactionaries’ in the eighteenth century: the new currency
of the word implies a radical change in the criteria commonly applied to
government. Before 1776/89, acquiescence in government was normal,
upheaval exceptional. The word ‘revolution’ was used to describe a
turn of the wheel of fortune in politics, and another turn of the wheel
might bring something familiar or something different to the top;
the word ‘reaction’, if used at all, had a neutral meaning, as a pendulum
‘reacts ’ by swinging to and fro. Those who believed in the improvement
of mankind did not as a rule connect it with a crusade against the
established order. After 1789, however, ‘revolution’ was generally held
to be an uncompleted process which could hardly be reversed and could
perhaps continue indefinitely; ‘reaction’ was anything that would
impede this process, and commonly took on a sinister meaning.
‘Conservatives’, themselves newly so labelled, who resented this
stigma of ‘reaction’, were preaching resistance to change regarded as a
process, not just asserting their right or power against an enemy of the
moment.
This new vocabulary, which still colours much of what is written
(not only about politics), may be connected with the notion of the per-
fectibility of man and the revolt against it (Chapter IV): without
insisting that any such doctrine was widely prevalent, we may detect a
hint of Utopia round the corner in much political thought and action
of the early nineteenth century. It is true that a subtle transition seems to
have been under way by 1830: ‘reaction’ is contrasted, not so much with
‘revolution’ as with ‘liberalism’. This implies that the goal is not to
replace one regime summarily by another, but to ensure that in any
regime the process of reaching decisions is conducted by means of public
discussion and not simply by decree or by violent subversion. Never-
theless, most early nineteenth-century liberals carried a Utopian flavour
about with them; so did some romantic conservatives who idealised the
past, and some of the earliest ‘socialists’ (still in 1830 not so labelled).
Even the Utilitarians, contemptuous as they were of natural rights and
natural duties, saw at first hardly any limits to the benefits which the
principle of the ‘greatest happiness of the greatest number’ might bring
to mankind. This principle was a most effective engine — from Cesare
Beccaria to Jeremy Bentham and his disciples — for attacking institu-
tions which might appear to common sense to be obstacles to happiness,
particularly in the fields of law and fiscal policy; to inflict unnecessary
pain is as senseless as to impose self-contradictory taxes. Unfortunately,
it was easier to detect pain and even to mitigate its causes than it was to
define or create positive happiness; but the shallowness of the Utilitar-
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INTRODUCTION
ians’ philosophy need not obscure the vigour of their weapons, at least
negatively, in removing hindrances to well-being. Their assumption
that ‘institutions make the man’ is untenable; but, although good
institutions cannot make men good or happy, we may allow that bad or
obsolete or ill-functioning institutions make it more difficult for men to
be good or happy. The question ‘what is the use of it?’ was more
effective than the question ‘what are the rights of it?’ for clearing what
appeared to be an administrative jungle.
In France itself, the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies (Vol.
VIII) had demolished, along with privilege, most of the existing in-
stitutions in army, navy, local government, taxation, church, schools
and universities — and had left a builder’s yard in which, along with
much rubbish, some materials for new construction were being
assembled, at least on paper. What followed is told in Chapter X.
Unhappily, of the Constituent’s most impressive constructions, one —
the elective system of local government — was overtaken by war and
emergency methods until Bonaparte took over the framework of the
new departements (with their neutral names intended to obliterate
historic provincial loyalties) and himself appointed the eighty or more
prefets\ these were shorn of the judicial and fiscal power of the old
provincial intendants, but all the powers of local government were more
formidably centralised than of old. The other construction, the Civil
Constitution of the Clergy (1790), was based on the principle of an
elective national church, incompatible with Roman hierarchy and
universality; it never won wide acceptance, and was replaced, first by a
kind of separation between Church and State (1794-1801), uneasy
because born in hostility, and then by Napoleon’s Concordat (1802),
which, just because it reflected the gallican Catholicism of ‘the majority
of Frenchmen’, outlived the Restoration and lasted for a century.
The men of the Convention (1792-95) concentrated power at home as
much as their predecessors had dispersed it, but their inoperative
Constitution of 1793 showed that dispersion was still the aim, and that
concentration was regarded only as the means of survival in emergency:
‘without Virtue, Terror is useless; without Terror, Virtue is power-
less’ (Robespierre, 5 February 1794). The emergency was partly
created by the Convention itself; it attempted too much in ‘making war
on history’ not only at home but at the same time beyond the frontiers
by offering ‘succour to all peoples who wish to recover their liberty’.
Out of the conflicts which followed, arose the fierce patriotism of
Frenchmen, at first revolutionary in sentiment but soon just militant
and acquisitive. With the collapse of the paper currency ( assignats ), the
Directory had to leave its armies to live by private plunder and public
exactions in liberated countries; with the fading of exalted hopes at
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home after Thermidor, the national pride of civilians too in France
came to be centred in the exploits of the armies and their generals. The
Directory needed a civilian-minded general as a mascot, and found in
Bonaparte a master.
The Napoleonic adventure is sketched in Chapter XI, Napoleon’s rule
in France as consul and as emperor in Chapter X. These were years of
fulfilment for administrators, whether soldiers or civilians, whether new
men enjoying the ‘carriere ouverte aux talents’ or men to whom more
prosaic careers would have been open under the old regime, including
many men of noble family, often royalists at heart, who rallied to the
Republic of the First Consul, to the republican Empire of 1804-8 or
finally to the hereditary dynastic Empire of the last years. In 1814, very
little was restored except the dynasty, which made, inevitably, far more
use of men who had served Napoleon than of ‘pure’ royalists. Louis
XVIII himself had never bowed the knee to the ‘usurper’, but many of
his ministers and prefets and magistrates had done so, and those who
submitted again during the Hundred Days were mostly not disturbed
after Waterloo if they had not positively abetted Napoleon. Political
debate, and the public exchange of ideas in the press, in pamphlets and
in books, were much more free than they had been at any time during
the wars; and the constitutional charter of 1814, with all its limitations
in the eyes of later generations (and in those of contemporaries who
wanted nothing less than the overthrow of the dynasty, or would not
be shocked by that), was no sham. In the words of a constitutional
lawyer of the Third Republic : ‘ our administration dates from the empire,
our politics date from the Restoration. . . . The role of the Revolution
has been immense, but it has remained negative. It destroyed the old
regime; it cleared the ground for modem institutions, and on that
ground Napoleon erected his edifice of despotism. ... To the Restora-
tion belongs the honour of having introduced in practice that funda-
mental principle of modern constitutions: the alliance between liberty
and authority. Its work has endured.’ 1 The experiment of constitu-
tional monarchy in France, before and after 1830, is sketched in
Chapter XII.
Elsewhere, except in some of the smaller states, the practice of repre-
sentative government made little headway before 1830, or indeed before
1848; but neither had it made any real headway before 1815. The great
majority of men in Europe were still occupied in traditional agriculture,
and many of them were illiterate. The men of science and learning
were not much impeded by forms of government, so long as these were
fairly stable, although the prestige of the exact sciences and of technology
was much increased in France, while that of philosophy and philology
1 J. Barthelemy, V introduction du regime parlementaire en France sous Louis XVIII et
Charles X (Paris, 1904), Avant-propos.
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INTRODUCTION
was higher than ever in Germany (Chapter V). The demand for con-
stitutional liberties came from men of the administrative, professional
and commercial classes; it was to be made irresistible, more by the
gradual revolution in industry and the transfer of wealth (or the
creation of new wealth) associated with it, than by the active political
agitation which itself reflected the contrast between new facts and old
tradition. The work of adapting institutions so as to fit a changing
social pattern was inevitably slow. Political seers like Saint Simon and
his often dissident followers (among whom Auguste Comte was
originally numbered) might announce the coming of a technocratic,
positivist, era in place of the long ages when land had been the pre-
vailing source of wealth and power and also (as it still was) the most
desirable evidence of wealth derived from other sources; but such
prophets seemed eccentric or fanciful to men engaged in the hurly-burly
of current affairs. Nor were these seers prophets of democracy in the
sense in which the ‘Jacobins’ had understood it. Among those who had
Teamed nothing and forgotten nothing’ since 1789 were not only the
survivors of the age of privilege (and the inheritors of privilege where it
had been little disturbed), but also the ‘men of 1792’, who constantly
expected, in vain, to rehearse anew the scenes of the Revolution, if
possible without its violence at home but not without its glorious
adventures abroad.
The ‘new look’ given to Prussia from 1807 (Chapter XIII) was not
effaced after 1815, even if constitutionalist hopes were disappointed
more than in some of the other German states; but the emancipation of
the serfs proved initially to be of less benefit to them than to the greater
landowners, some of whom foresaw at the time that, if the peasant was
no longer bound to the soil, neither would the soil be bound to the
peasant. A strict administration, and a prospect of economic advan-
tage, were the greatest attractions that Prussia could offer to her old or
new subjects and to her weaker neighbours. The first of these advan-
tages was rooted in earlier tradition and was reinforced by the products
of the Prussian universities, administering the Prussian Landrecht
(state law) which had been codified in 1794 (but commercial law was not
codified until 1845). The second advantage was provided by the
moderate Prussian tariff of 1818 and by the tariff union now beginning
(from 1828) to be offered to neighbours willing to be included. The law
of 1818 reversed the old system of discouraging exports of corn, and
lowered tariffs all round. It also gave Prussia for the first time a single
system for all the provinces, but the ratio of frontier-line to area was
still very high. Tariff unions would therefore give an immediate saving
of expense in addition to the prospect of positive gain and perhaps more
distant political advantage. At the same time, roads were designed to
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avoid or minimise tariff barriers: for example, from Halberstadt to
Cologne between Hanover and Hesse (1819), with a branch from
Paderbom southwards (1829), and from Magdeburg to Hanover (1829).
Among the provincial Diets set up in Prussia from 1823, that of the
Rhineland province was the most active, but no central system of
representation existed. Hanover was oddly ‘reactionary’ after 1815,
considering its long connection with England; but many of the states of
central and south Germany had constitutions based (as in France) on a
narrow franchise but protecting civil rights, for example Nassau (before
1814), Weimar, Bavaria, Baden, Wiirttemberg and Hesse (all these
1816-20). The keynote of these, especially the Bavarian, was that of the
enlightenment rather than of liberalism. The Federal Act (1819) did
indeed envisage constitutional systems in each state; but very soon the
state governments and the Federal Diet were confronted by movements
which seemed to them not constitutional but revolutionary. There was
indeed a good deal of froth on the beer of these early German liberals or
radicals, but the governments of states which had working repre-
sentative constitutions were not, on the whole, more dangerously
threatened than those of states which had none.
The doctrine of immobility was partly imposed on the Confederation
by the presidency of Austria. This was not uncongenial to Metternich
in constitutional matters, resourceful and pliant though he was in
diplomacy and administration; but in any case the personal views of the
emperor, and the peculiar situation in the monarchy, left little room for
any alternative to immobility (Chapter XIV). The peculiarity of Austria
was that none of the historic ‘nations’ in it coincided with the just
emerging racial and linguistic nationalities; moreover the emperor’s
government had no experience of a working constitution except that of
the kingdom of Hungary, designed to preserve the ancient privileges of
the Magyar nobles, whose ideas were more like those of the barons of
Runnymede than those of contemporary liberals. It is not surprising
that the emperor avoided su mm oning the Hungarian Diet from 1812
to 1825. Above all, it was in his interest after 1815, financially and
politically, to avoid wars, for the ‘parties of movement’ in Europe
generally were likely to profit by war : the Greeks counted on a Russian
war against Turkey in the 1820’s, and the French Left in 1830-1 wanted
to push Louis Philippe towards intervention in Italy or Belgium or
Poland. Revolutionary movements might also provoke war by neigh-
bours fearing infection: Metternich felt obliged to intervene in Naples,
while Russia offered, and France decided, to intervene in Spain.
Metternich also held that rulers could help to forestall such embarrass-
ing situations. It is well known that King Ferdinand of Naples promised
him not to make constitutional changes without Austrian approval, but
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INTRODUCTION
less well known that the king was also warned against trying to undo
the changes introduced by Murat in law and administration (Chapter
XV, p. 429). The Austrian government in the north did not compare
badly with those of the rest of Italy (except perhaps for a ‘liberal oasis’
in Tuscany). It was not more foreign than French government had been,
and the number of those who objected to foreign rule as such was small,
even if they held the future. It was difficult to judge the government of
the papal states by current standards, with its unique blend of easy-
going paternalism and cruel inefficiency; but while Cardinal Consalvi
was secretary of state, its intentions could hardly be called ‘reactionary’.
Consalvi was well aware of the danger of looking backwards; in a letter
of August 1814 to the future Charles X of France, he was already urging
the king and his brother to imitate Solon’s work of reconciliation, and
not the example of Charles II, ‘who, after promising to forget the past,
forgave nobody, poisoned his own reign, and prepared for the Stuart
dynasty a new downfall, which came about under his brother — this
time irrevocably’. 1 But, on the death of Pius VII (1823), Consalvi made
way for the zealots in Rome, and throughout Italy the movements of
1821 in Naples and Piedmont intensified police activity, which most
directly affected comparatively small but well-to-do and vocal groups of
educated men (Chapter XV).
Although it was Spain (Chapter XVI) which gave to the name ‘ Liberal ’
a specifically political significance, the character of liberalism in the
Peninsula was from the first peculiar, determined by the unique position
of the Church and connected with officers in the army and soon with
rival groups within the royal families and at court. Between 1812 and
1830 the reluctance of all parties to let go of overseas empire over-
shadowed all other issues. The Spanish constitution of 1812 — uni-
cameral, cumbrous and without any provision for amendment — was a
rallying cry for Liberals in the twenties, but after 1830 the much more
viable constitution of Belgium began to fill that role.
The smaller states of Europe had the best opportunity after 1815 of
developing parliamentary institutions, and some of them used it, though
in different ways (Chapter XVII). Their relative freedom from the over-
riding preoccupation of other governments with international politics
had varying effects. The state constitutions within Germany have
already been mentioned. The Baltic was no longer so much a focus of
great rivalries, and the Scandinavian countries were all hard hit
economically by the peace. In Denmark, the tranquillity of a bureau-
cratic but not reactionary government was hardly disturbed until the
problem of Schleswig and Holstein began later to create a popular
agitation; but both the Swedish estates under the system of 1809 and the
1 Consalvi to Artois, August 1814. P. Rinieri, II Congresso di Vienna , pp. 271-2, cited
in Fliche et Martin, Histoire de VEglise, vol. xx, by J. Leflon (Paris, 1949), p. 309.
2 I 7 NCMH IX
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WAR AND PEACE IN AN AGE OF UPHEAVAL
single popular Chamber of Norway (1814) had a genuine existence
within the union under their tactful foreign ruler Bemadotte, first as
crown prince and then as Charles XIV (1818-44). The independence of
the Netherlands and Switzerland was secured by the interest of their
greater neighbours in a balance of power and in the containment of
France, although both countries underwent the pressure of foreign
governments against the activities of political refugees within their
borders. Swiss politics were still mainly municipal and patrician until
1847-8, but in the Netherlands the uneasy marriage between Protestant
Holland and Catholic Belgium was a spur to organised political parties,
and this impetus survived the crisis of separation which was beginning
before 1830. Belgium, already the spearhead of the industrial revolution
in Europe (Chapter II, pp. 54-5), was soon also to be regarded, under
its sagacious king Leopold I, as the model constitutional monarchy on
the Continent (Vol. X, p. 191). Its unique separation between Church
and State worked tolerably well, and its French culture (after twenty
years as part of France) concealed as yet the popular Flemish founda-
tion which (in more than half the country) underlay the politically
educated classes. William I, during the period of Union (1814-30),
found no popular response when he tried to promote, as a counter to
French influence, not the Flemish language but the Dutch, which the
Flemings of that day could not readily use or even understand.
The significance of the reign of the emperor Alexander I of Russia
(1801-25), and of the ‘Decembrist’ episode on his death, is discussed in
Chapter XVIII. The reign began, like several earlier ones, with a palace
revolution in almost oriental style, and ended in a mystery deepened
by unnecessary, but again not unprecedented, secretiveness within the
imperial family as to the succession. Yet during this reign Russia
became more than ever before a part of Europe. At home the Slavophil
reaction against the ‘westemisers’ was only just beginning in the 1820’s
and was officially suspect; abroad, Russophobia was still the exception,
not the rule, at least until the Turkish war of 1828-9. As a young man
Alexander was steeped in the ideas of his tutor La Harpe, a French-Swiss
republican; for some years he leaned on the advice of the Catholic
Polish grand seigneur. Prince Adam Czartoryski; in the last period he
wavered, in foreign policy, between the counsels of other non-Russians:
Nesselrode, a professional diplomatist of German origin ; Capodistrias, a
Corfiot educated in Italy, Greek in sentiment but also feeling more at
home in Switzerland than in St Petersburg; and, intermittently, Metter-
nich, whose influence on Alexander always faded on the emperor’s
return to Russia. All these were comparatively young men — well under
fifty in 1815 — and Alexander him self was only forty-seven when his reign
ended in 1825.
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In spite of all these ‘western’ influences, or perhaps because they were
foreign influences on a man whose environment was Russian, there was
another side to Alexander — autocratic, wilful and misty; in the internal
government of the Empire his chief personal advisers, though far from
being elder statesmen, were wholly Russian. Speranskii, son of an
Orthodox priest and himself educated in a seminary, was inclined to
administrative reform within a traditional framework; but after his dis-
grace in 1812 the stage was held by the strange and violent Arakcheev,
whose character has never been very intelligible to western observers.
Catherine II, a German princess, had been cheerfully cynical enough to
keep her balance in an alien world; but a Russian ruler who took him-
self as seriously as did Alexander I was likely to be mentally divided
between his mainly western education and the primitive realities of life
around him. When the Russian armies swept across Europe in 1813-14,
the current image in the West was that of savage hordes and the ‘rule of
the knout’; but Russia could no longer be represented as the ‘giant
with the feet of clay’ (Diderot); and soon Parisians, who in any case
wanted to cultivate the tsar’s good will, were astonished by his own
captivating charm and by the intelligent good manners of his entourage.
The Russian occupying army was not specially unpopular after the first
months; many of its younger officers were welcome in the most
‘advanced’ salons, and some of them carried home ideas and hopes
which led them after December 1825 to the scaffold or to Siberia.
Joseph de Maistre’s posthumous Soirees de Saint Petersbourg (1822)
was a best seller (not only in France), with its brilliant and intimate
picture of aristocratic society and its prophecies of an eventual re-
volution which would make Russia far more powerful than before. The
first solid background was provided by the seven volumes (each quickly
translated) of Karamzin’s Histoire de Vempire russe (1819-26). 1 There
was some force in Mettemich’s comment on the death of Alexander I,
before the succession was settled: ‘the history of Russia will begin where
the romance of Russia ends.’ 2
In republican North America (Chapter XXII) constitution-making
followed a successful revolution instead of preceding it or being
entangled in the process. The direct influence of the United States
upon Europe was less noticeable during the wars and their aftermath
than in the previous twenty years or in the twenty years after 1830.
Frenchmen were immersed in the stream of their own revolution and no
longer needed to cite an example which was less relevant in its detailed
1 R. T. McNally, ‘Das Russlandbild in der Publizistik Frankreichs, 1814-43’, in
Forschungeti zur osteuropdischen Geschichte, Bd. 6 (Berlin, 1958), pp. 82-169.
* Mettemich to Ottenfels, 18 December 1825. Memoirs (Engl, trans., 1889), vol. rv,
p. 261.
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course than it had been in the general inspiration. Americans were
equally preoccupied, and their feelings of goodwill towards France
faded in disillusionment. The long sea war hindered their contacts
with Europe, and their feelings about the contest from time to time
turned largely on the question which side was most interrupting or
molesting their overseas trade. On balance, the things that were done or
planned in Europe strengthened the federal government at the centre,
simply because it had to make big decisions — purchasing Louisiana,
protecting its merchants, deciding on war and peace with England
(1812-14), and then reacting against rumours of European intervention
or even colonisation in Central and South America.
The history of these more southerly Americas, in contrast, was
closely connected with that of Europe in this period (Chapter XXIII).
‘It would be almost as true to say that Spain fell away from the Indies
as to say that the Indies fell away from Spain.’ 1 Certainly, the fact that
the viceroy of each great province had been linked with Madrid more
than with his not very accessible neighbours meant, first that the
abdication of Ferdinand VII (1808) left each province bewildered and
isolated, and secondly that the independent states formed out of these
provinces had no strong foundations for the federal union of which
Bolivar and some other leaders dreamed. The movements for inde-
pendence were ambiguous — partly, at first, in the name of the king
against a French usurper in Madrid, but soon (and in some minds from
the first) with the declared object of permanent separation from any
European political sovereign. Yet there was no break away from the
civilisation of the mother countries. By the 1820’s, there was no future
in the British government’s idea of encouraging hereditary monarchies
in those provinces which could not be reconciled with Spain by media-
tion — in spite of the example of Brazil, ruled by the heir to the
Portuguese throne, who preferred the troubles of the new world to those
of the old. Nevertheless, the constitutions of the new Republics, though
showing a mixture of influences from France and from the United
States, completely rejected both French Gallicanism and American
separation between Church and State; they one and all made the
Roman Catholic Church the only publicly recognised religion.
The shifting alignment of the Powers during and after the wars is
described in Chapters IX, XXIV and XXV. How far did differing reg-
imes and rival ideologies determine these patterns ? In 1793, it seemed
that the governments of France’s neighbours, and several others that
were less nearly threatened, were banded together in defence of the old
order against the ideas, the example and the missionary aggression of
1 Cambridge Modern History, vol. x (1907), p. 277.
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INTRODUCTION
revolutionary France. But their activity was half-hearted: two years
later, Prussia, Holland and Spain had made peace (April-July 1795); and
Catherine II, though nominally allied to Austria, Prussia and England,
kept Russia out of the war while she was completing the partition of
Poland. Her successor, Paul I, seems to have been moved by resent-
ments and enthusiasms more than by cool policy; his personal interest
in Malta, and his anger at British treatment of neutrals at sea, warred
against his disapproval of France and the desire, which inclined him
towards Britain, to check French power in Italy and the Mediterranean.
Nevertheless, in 1799 a Russian army in Italy and a Russian squadron at
Corfu were new portents, almost equally alarming to the governments of
France and Britain.
With the consolidation of Napoleon’s power as consul and then as
emperor, it was only the disinherited princes like the king of Sardinia
who never ceased to regard him as a revolutionary usurper. The future
Louis XVIII might protest against the recognition of Napoleon’s titles
by the Pope and later by the sultan, but France was no longer subject
to any ideological boycott by governments. They might fear the
excessive power of the French Empire, as they would later fear that of
the Russian, but their course was mapped by the exigencies of the
moment. They might feel doubts about the permanence of Napoleon’s
power, but in January 1806 the king of Bavaria gave his daughter in
marriage to Napoleon’s stepson. Four years later, another of the oldest
dynasties (and the first to have been at war with revolutionary France)
was directly linked by marriage to Napoleon as the founder of a new
dynasty; and Austria was reluctant in 1814 to exclude the heir. Even
Englishmen, most consistent in their enmity, welcomed the Peace of
Amiens in 1801-2, and could not know for certain in advance, for all
their suspicions, that it was to be no more than a short-lived truce;
nor did the government make a Bourbon restoration into an official
aim of the renewed war, as Pitt had virtually done until then. For
Alexander I, the alliance with Napoleon at Tilsit (1807) needed no
more to be excused than the coalition against him two years earlier; it
is true that the ensuing negotiations which dragged on between them only
showed how deep and unresolved were the differences in their ideas
about Turkey and the Straits, but these differences were not advertised
as ingredients in a ‘cold war’. The tsar, after rebuffing Napoleon’s
overture for a Russian princess, resented both his abrupt success in
winning an Austrian one instead, and also soon the deposition of
Alexander’s own brother-in-law by the French annexation of Olden-
burg; but almost until the coming invasion of Russia was evident, the
forms of friendship and alliance were outwardly preserved.
The campaigns in Russia, and then westwards across Germany, sealed
Napoleon’s fate, but they also (along with the apparent popularity in
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Spain of Wellington’s successes) revived in the tsar’s mind, for a time,
his inclination to confide in popular support. In 1804, he had talked of
‘a widespread opinion that the French cause is that of the liberty and
prosperity of the nations’. 1 Ten years later he remarked that Napoleon
was overthrown not by cabinets but by peoples, and that an outlet must
be found for a new spirit in Europe that was at once constitutional,
warlike and national. 2 The Prussian government, in escaping from
subservience to France, was still much less inclined to put faith in
appeals to the people, and in fact Napoleon was defeated by pro-
fessional armies, not by patriotic volunteers; but not all Prussian officers
wanted to return to bureaucratic monarchy — Gneisenau, for example,
was as keen for liberal regimes in Germany as he was for unsparing
revenge against France. The tsar’s mood, combined with his distrust
of the Bourbons and the Prussians alike, disposed him to insist on a
constitutional charter for France in 1814.
The diplomatic history leading up to the settlement made at Vienna
in 1814-15 is sketched in Chapter XXIV, and that of the following years
in Chapter XXV. It is generally agreed that ‘legitimacy’ played only a
small part in the minds of the peace-makers, compared with the desire
to ensure a fairly stable equilibrium among the powers. Historians still
disagree about the precise relation of the Quadruple Alliance for the
containment of France to the tsar’s notion of an alliance of the powers
on a wider basis, with a general guarantee of the settlement and of
existing regimes. It has been argued that Alexander looked to France
and Spain as maritime powers, and beyond Europe to the United
States, to create a global equilibrium under Russian patronage, off-
setting both the supremacy of Britain at sea and that of Austria in
Central Europe; and that the defeat of his repeated proposals for
widening the Alliance was the real triumph of Castlereagh and Metter-
nich in these years. The importance of the United States in the tsar’s
mind has perhaps been exaggerated, 3 but his conception in September
1815 of a ‘Holy Alliance’ was certainly not that of a police force of
sovereigns against their peoples. Holland and Wiirttemberg were
among the first of the smaller states to adhere to it, Switzerland and the
Hanse cities did so in the summer of 1817, and an invitation to adhere
was not rejected by the United States until as late as June 1819. Nor
was it intended as a plan for a crusade against the Turk, for the tsar
1 1 1 September 1 804. Cited by M. Bourquin, Histoire de la Sainte Alliance (Geneva, 1 954),
p. 19.
’ K. Waliszewski, Le regne d' Alexandre I, vol. n (Paris, 1924), p. 378.
s M. Bourquin, op. cit., p. 183, n. 1, casts doubt in this matter on the work, which he for
the most part endorsed, of J. H. Pirenne, Histoire de la Sainte Alliance , 2 vols. (Neuchatel,
1946, and Geneva, 1954). See also a note on Pirenne’s thesis in Clio, vol. ix. 1, bk. rv
by J. Droz (Paris, 1953 ), P- 583.
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INTRODUCTION
had lately not been averse to a guarantee, including the frontiers of
Turkey, provided that Russo-Turkish disputes about the Treaty of
Bucharest (1812) were first settled.
The tsar’s wider plans were first obscured by their vagueness, then
killed by Castlereagh and Metternich, and finally buried by his own
change of mood. In the autumn of 1820, he came disillusioned from
Warsaw to Troppau, and there had news, before the final Protocol
was signed, of a mutiny of his own Semenov regiment. His Holy
Alliance of 1815 was not revived, but he was now prepared to use the
narrower Alliance for counter-revolutionary ends, while France stood
aside and Britain protested. A few months later, the news from Greece
put him in a fresh dilemma. He could disavow the revolt, but he could
not be indifferent to its consequences. He could be induced to patch
up the rupture of relations with Turkey and to part with his now
embarrassing servant Capodistrias (July 1822); but the conservative
Alliance could not survive this eastern complication or the use which
Canning made both of that and of the Spanish American issue to dis-
credit the very conception of a general Alliance of any colour. The
Alliance was dead in effect before the tsar himself died (December 1825);
within two years it was publicly repudiated by the combination of
Russia, England and Bourbon France to settle the Greek question inde-
pendently of it (Treaty of London, July 1827), and nine months later
by the Russian war on Turkey independently of that very combination.
Although the relations between governments, both before and after
1815, were determined by their ambitions, fears and interests rather
than by any ideology, the attitude of all rulers (not excluding Napoleon
and Alexander) towards their peoples was certainly affected by the fear
of ‘Jacobinism’. Such fears had not been unreasonable in the 1790’s,
and were reflected as much in London as in Vienna. The fear of
anarchy and violence may have been much exaggerated, and it is true
that Napoleon sent many more men to their deaths than did the French
Republic (including the Terror) and all its short-lived sister republics.
There may be cases where civil strife is in the end more fruitful than
foreign war: the American and French Revolutions, and the American
Civil War, may be among them. Yet the ‘Great Schism’ between
Frenchmen created by the events of the 1790’s was not easily healed;
in politics, the memory of heads severed by the guillotine was longer
than that of bodies lying on foreign battlefields. From 1800 to 1815,
wars and the demands of war everywhere blocked internal reform or
gave it a feverish look; after 1815, the fear that radical change might
lead to civil strife, and so to foreign war too, certainly made for im-
mobility in politics. Conservatism came not only from the side of
governments, for the radicals in Europe (and even in the mobile societies
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of America) were numerically few, though correspondingly vocal.
Secret societies and masonic lodges were not reliable pillars of a ‘ Holy
Alliance of Peoples’ against that ascribed to monarchs.
Moreover, not all radicals were admirers of the French example.
Some of the reaction to it in thought and literature is described in
Chapter IV. It may be added that Mazzini, much as he owed in
thought to the Revolution, constantly reproached the French for giving
priority to rights over duties; that the acute if eccentric Charles Fourier
denounced their conception of liberty and equality in which political
and economic power was still reserved to a minority, and to one sex; 1
and that Jeremy Bentham and the early Utilitarians, while they shared
the French lack of respect for tradition, had no greater respect for the
‘anarchical fallacy’ of natural rights. Their campaigns for ruthless
lopping off dead wood often made them the allies of political democrats
in Europe; but, like Saint-Simon and his disciples, they were bound also
to look to technical administrators and even to enlightened autocrats
for the diffusion of happiness by ‘improvement’. Bentham himself in
old age wrote flattering letters to Muhammad Ali, the autocrat of
Egypt, and the influence of the Utilitarians upon English administrators
in India was conspicuous (Chapter XX). 2
Probably the strongest link between radicalism after 1815 and the
eighteenth century (whether of the Enlightenment or of the Revolution)
was that of anti-clerical sentiment, which had become (what it had not
been to Joseph II) a sentiment of suspicion against all institutional
religion, especially that of Rome. This sentiment, fostered by the
privileged position of the higher clergy in many countries, was ex-
pressed at all levels, from philosophic doubt, or the refined mockery of
Stendhal, to the vulgar abuse of Paul-Louis Courier. The indirect
method of Diderot, partly dictated by the censorship, and the polite
scepticism of Voltaire or Gibbon, were now replaced by frontal attacks;
but the old appeal to ‘common sense’ rationalism or deism, presenting
the Christian religion as irrelevant or ridiculous for educated men of
taste, was still in this period commoner than the painful quest of the
serious agnostic confronted by unwelcome new difficulties (stemming
from biblical criticism or natural science) in accepting the traditional
expression of revealed religion (Chapter VI). In between, a high
minded man in public life, who was repelled by hedonism or material-
ism and felt the immense social value of Christian tradition, might adopt,
in effect, a position of ‘Christian deism’, not unlike that of Benjamin
Jowett a little later. Guizot, nursed in the Geneva school, was occupied
to the end of his life in trying to find, within the Huguenot church, an
1 R. C. Bowles, 'The reactions of Charles Fourier to the French Revolution’, in French
Historical Studies, vol. i, pp. 348-56 (North Carolina State College, i960).
* Cf. E. T. Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford, 1959).
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INTRODUCTION
eclectic confession which would avoid the most thorny questions, and
he never spoke disrespectfully of serious Catholics. Tocqueville, whose
Catholic upbringing never lost its attraction for him, felt no sense of
liberation when he ceased about 1820 to be a practising or believing
Catholic. His acceptance of the sacraments at the end of his life was
probably a gesture against the militant critics of Rome rather than a
sign of total re-conversion. 1
In any case, the vast majority of men (not to mention the other half
of the human race, whose disposition was much neglected by male
thinkers) were not apt to find religion irrelevant or ridiculous in their
personal fives, even if they often treated it with the neglect of familiarity
except on the occasion of birth, marriage and death. Literate or illiterate,
satisfied or hungry, they might, like their betters, find the precepts of
religion inconvenient to their desires; but they were not likely to find
intellectually unacceptable a religion which taught that the illiterate and
the simple were as capable as the learned of reflection and of spiritual
insight. For most people, the pattern of living was still governed by the
seasons, among the neighbours in the village or small town; if they had
any leisure, it was not occupied, or distracted, by daily newspapers or
by organised sport and entertainment. It seems likely then that, where
anti-clerical radicalism met with a popular response, that response was
not a considered rejection of Christian teaching as such, but rather a
protest against the failure of churches and their clergy to five up to it —
and in passing judgment on the clergy many people were apt to expect
of them a standard of conduct which they would never dream of
applying to themselves. The momentary popularity of the clergy, even
in Paris, in February to March 1848 was to suggest that republican or
at least popular sentiment was not necessarily anti-clerical.
However that may be, the most spectacular movements of the 1820’s
— the Greek revolt and the struggles for independence in South America
— were not as radical in their aims as in their methods. Simple Orthodox
sentiment against the infidel Turk, and a very simple notion of political
freedom, were the driving popular forces among the fighting men in
Greece; and the same sentiments were more or less shared by most of
their native leaders. In South America some of the leaders were perhaps
more separated from their people in their religious and political aims,
but the new republics, however unstable, seemed much less revolution-
ary in the event than in their origins. Mettemich no doubt understood
this : he seems to have been more concerned in South America about the
method and the example than about the result; and, again, to have
meant what he said when, as early as 1825, he suggested a small inde-
pendent Greece in preference to a larger one dependent nominally on
1 D. S. Goldstein, ‘The religious beliefs of de Tocqueville’, in French Historical Studies,
vol. 1, pp. 379-415 (North Carolina State College, i960).
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Turkey but actually upon Russian good will. If political immobility
was still the watchword in Mettemich’s Austria until 1848, and in
Russia over Alexander I’s last years and the whole reign of Nicholas I
(1825-55), that may be ascribed not only to the ruling personalities but
even more to the peculiar problems of those two Empires, problems
which the shock of 1848 in Austria and that of 1856 in Russia made
evident to the world but did little to solve.
From about 1828, however, the mounting discontent in France and
Belgium, which led men of such conservative temper as Guizot or
Louis de Potter to skate (for quite different reasons) on the edge of
revolution; in Britain, the relief of Protestant dissenters and Roman
Catholics (measures hitherto politically impossible) and the growing
agitation for parliamentary reform; in Germany the implications of the
Prussian tariff unions for the future ; in the United States the election
of Andrew Jackson as President — all these, with the muted revolutions
of 1830, seem to announce the advent of a new generation, less un-
willing to face unwelcome changes, or less Utopian in demanding or
prophesying change. Tories and Whigs were to become conservatives
and liberals. There is something novel in the enormous success in
many languages of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (2 vols., 1835,
1840), or in Bentinck’s decision to introduce western education in
India (1835). Both these men were of aristocratic birth and leanings, but
the one took an open-eyed plunge in thought, and the other a bold
plunge of policy, neither of which can easily be imagined twenty years
earlier. Gregory XVI was to give way to Pius IX, bringing hopes, for a
time, to liberal Catholics. Proudhon (the first social-revolutionary
writer of working-class origin) and Karl Marx were to go much further
than their predecessors, but both claimed to be more interested in facts
than in the moral foundation of rights, and to be no Utopians. The
building of a heavenly city on earth was to give way to social engineer-
ing.
‘If state power was advancing, the power of public opinion was
advancing too’ (Chapter VII, p. 180). The freedom of the press,
proclaimed in 1789, was strictly limited, not only by governments of all
shades which either suppressed or manipulated news and opinion, but
also by small circulations, lack of financial independence and conse-
quent venality. Yet the principle was reaffirmed in the French and other
constitutions after Napoleon’s fall, and the growing importance of the
newspaper press was seen, despite fluctuating restrictions, in the public
controversies over principles throughout the restoration period in
France and in its direct influence on politics in England, especially in the
debate about parliamentary reform. Deeper currents of opinion in
literature and thought were, naturally, reflected less in newspapers than
in periodical reviews, which abounded in England and France after the
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INTRODUCTION
wars; although often the ephemeral organs of small groups, they were
the forum for the battles between the classical and the romantic in
literature, the utilitarian and the idealist in philosophy and to some
extent also between the traditional and the critical in religion.
But the key to victory in these contests was seen to be in the school
and the university ; in both, the question of the method and purpose of
education was central. The followers of Rousseau looked first to the
release of individual powers, Pestalozzi and Robert Owen to the
promotion of social utility and purpose in popular education. In
secondary and higher education, Wilhelm von Humboldt gave great
impetus in Germany to the gospel of classical humanism; philologists
set the tone in the gymnasia, historians also and jurists in the universi-
ties. But the role of the state in organising a lay teaching profession
gave it a commanding position in Prussia after 1815 (at least above the
primary level), while in France the tradition of regimentation intro-
duced by Napoleon was continued, with a different emphasis, during the
Restoration. Napoleon’s University was not hostile to Catholicism,
provided it was loyal to the Concordat and the imperial regime.
Fontanes, its grand master, was continued at first under Louis XVIII,
and the aristocratic royalists failed to get rid of the Concordat or the
University, those twin monsters created by the usurper. The clergy soon
had much more power in primary and secondary education, but hardly
succeeded in penetrating very deeply into the University, either in filling
posts or in reorienting its tone. Lamennais and the crusaders continued
to see in it the stronghold of ‘ indifferentism ’.
The influence of religion in education was greater at all levels in
England than in France or probably in Germany. This was in spite or
even because of the denominational rivalry at the primary stage between
Church and dissent, represented by Andrew Bell’s National Society
and the British and Foreign Society whose founder, Joseph Lancaster,
was also the apostle of his peculiar but economical ‘mutual system’ of
instruction by the pupils. Neither party enjoyed state aid, though
governments took for granted a close link between education and
religion. In the endowed grammar schools, both the many local ones
and the few that catered for the upper class, Latin and Greek were the
stuff of education, often with very little mathematics; but languages and
even some science were taught in some of the private unendowed
schools, including the dissenting academies which reached into higher
education too. Oxford and Cambridge were notorious for laxity in
observing their statutes. At least, able young Anglicans could and did
educate each other and find intellectual stimulus among some of their
seniors in these close societies; but the minimum standard required
could hardly have been lower. The wind of reform breathed very
gently until the middle of the nineteenth century. In the absence of
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any real system of higher education, scholarship and culture had been
nourished mainly in the reading habits of those English gentlemen who
used and added to their private libraries, and in their patronage of
exceptionally gifted men who were noticed locally and found their way
to a literary or legal career in London, or through the universities into
the established Church. The results were sometimes eccentric, but
could also be exceedingly fruitful.
Behind the dramatic reversals of fortune in politics and war, and not
demonstrably connected with them or with the dispersed operation of
new economic forces, individuals or very small groups of men were
making discoveries or influencing thought in ways which pointed to
even greater changes in the pattern of men’s lives, or in their outlook on
life. Scientific discoveries must be individual and sometimes lonely; the
great men had worked in relative isolation, linked only by a common
passion for measuring, explaining and reducing to order what they
found in nature, or in elaborating the mathematical tools which could
help them to do so. Such individual intellectual enterprise was not new,
but discoveries were now becoming cumulative. Some of these men were
diffusing knowledge as teachers and in systematic treatises. The organisa-
tion and dissemination of knowledge was beginning to produce a
profession of scientists and a more widespread readiness to embrace
new scientific ideas. In Paris and in the centres directly influenced by
French ‘cultural imperialism’, the State honoured and aided scientists,
especially those who could be of service to it. The French Institut and
Ecole Polytechnique gave impetus to similar developments elsewhere,
above all in the Prussian Academy and the new University of Berlin
(1810), nursed by the Humboldt brothers, and in other German centres,
whose fame was later to outstrip that of the French models.
This process of organisation, with the prospect of careers open to
scientific talent, is described in Chapter V, along with a survey of
achievements such as those of Laplace in mathematical analysis, of
Lagrange and Joseph Fourier in the abstract analysis of mechanics and
heat, of Volta, Ampere and others in electricity, of Dalton and Berzelius
among others in physical chemistry, of Lamarck and Cuvier (from
different angles) in systematic biology, of Bichat and Magendie in
experimental biology, of Hutton and Smith in geology. Geology and
biology were soon to impinge on traditional beliefs about the antiquity
of life on earth and (with much continuing debate among scientists)
about the origin of different species.
‘Theoretical science still had little to offer to industry’, but in the
rational and empirical ‘coercion of opportunity . . . the behaviour of
the engineers and industrialists resonates with that of men of science’
(Chapter V, p. 141). The steam-engine and the infant chemical
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INTRODUCTION
industry, for instance, owed more to experience than to theory, but
there were links between invention and theory in Sadi Carnot’s re-
flections on heat, or in Faraday’s experiments, which gave birth
respectively to thermodynamics and to the dynamo. The metric system
is a legacy of the Revolution, launched in 1799 but not widely used for
forty years. The use of uniform and interchangeable parts for machines,
awards to inventors and patents for their protection, technical diction-
aries and journals — all these began or multiplied in this age. In
technology, England naturally played a big part, and there the period
ends, fittingly in this field, with the spread of Mechanics’ Institutes and
the foundation in 1831 of the British Association for the Advancement
of Science.
‘Cross and tricolour had become opposing symbols for millions of
Europeans in 1793’ (Chapter VI, p. 146). That chapter surveys
the conflicts and reconciliations between governments and organised
churches during the next forty years, and suggests some of the internal
questionings within the churches, springing not only from Catholic doubts
about the marriage of throne and altar but also from deeper challenges
to traditional apologetics, especially among the Protestants. Schleier-
macher claimed that religion was ‘not a set of propositions or an ethical
code, but an inward experience, direct, intuitive, existing in its own
right as a central part of human life’ (Chapter VI, p. 169); Christian
doctrines expressed Christian experience; they were historically condi-
tioned, and their expression could alter as the nature of that experience
altered through time. Thus theology would be prepared to meet the
challenge of new knowledge and of new experiences too.
The political controversies of the age were less directly reflected in the
arts (Chapter VIII) than in literature, education and ecclesiastical
affairs. The confused battles between ancients and moderns, between
classical (or pseudo-classical) and romantic, between the supremacy of
form acceptable to cultivated common sense and that of personal feel-
ings movingly expressed — these battles were not fought by armies in
clearly contrasted uniforms but by mingled individuals and groups in
motley dress and varying postures. A ‘classical’ battle-scene of the
empire could be as sensational in its effect as a ‘romantic’ landscape
could be discreet and elegant. It is even more rash to pin simple labels
on to the great music of this period. But the place of music in society
was changing in a way not unlike that of science, in that it was taking a
more professional shape, with public concerts appearing alongside
private chamber music; and composers were concerned, like authors,
with publishers and the public.
The developments in science and technology, in educational theory
and practice and the marshalling of opinion through the press, in
theology and church life, or again in music and the visual arts — these
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did not all point in the same direction. Pure science and technology
were not very closely linked either in method or purpose. Each, by
concentrating on measurable and manageable knowledge, would give
rise to new powers : intellectual power, bringing its own special kind of
satisfaction; empirical power, insatiable and apparently uncontrollable
in its social effects. Neither science nor technology had power to bring
order into the lives of individuals or into the affairs of men in society.
Paradoxically, the ‘enlightened’ idea of education for efficiency and
opportunity — of the career open to talents — went along with Rousseau’s
notion of education to liberate the generous sentiments of the man and
the citizen. Both rational deism and the revolutionary cult of civic
patriotism, with its quasi-religious symbolism, could become as much
the hand-maids of power politics as could older ecclesiastical systems.
The rational and the intuitive were not bound to cross swords if they
could keep to their autonomous paths. Could they not indeed be
different activities of the same person — why should he not delight both
in ordering knowledge or improving practical devices and also in
cherishing an image of himself and his relations with other persons or in
finding a clue to the wonder and the pain of man’s existence? Yet the
two did cross swords when each was apt to claim a monopoly. Like
empire and papacy, they were not easily contained in a Gelasian theory
of autonomous co-existence. The rational and positive spirit would slip
into a rationalist and positivist strait-waistcoat, mistaking it for an
imperial robe; and the intuitive spirit would wade into a treacherous
bog of subjective romanticism, mistaking it for a glorious ocean plunge.
Possibly the music of Beethoven came nearest to harmonising the two
for this age.
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CHAPTER II
ECONOMIC CHANGE IN ENGLAND AND
EUROPE, 1780-1830
I N 1834 it seemed to Chateaubriand that ‘Europe is racing towards
democracy. . . . France and England, like two enormous battering-
rams, beat again and again upon the crumbling ramparts of the old
society.’ Certainly the powerful influences of political and economic
liberalism, stemming largely from the French Revolution and the
English Industrial Revolution, had already begun to affect Europe.
By 1830 England was transmitting to Europe and overseas — by direct
influence or by example — new methods of production, new economic
policies, and new social attitudes that favoured rapid economic growth.
England, indeed, was ‘the engine of growth’ that forced European and
world development, mainly by the expansion of international trade
and by the emigration of men and capital. The long-term result was
increased international specialisation and interdependence, and the
creation of a world network of trading and financial relations, but
national changes by 1830, except in England and in Belgium, were not
dramatic. In spite of focal points of development in the coal fields of
England and Belgium, and in spite of universal pre-occupation with
industry, still over the vast area of Europe men’s way of life and men’s
way of earning a living remained much the same as they had been for
centuries, especially in southern, central and eastern regions. In 1826
a Belgian deputy, with his eyes on the growing industries of his own
country, proclaimed that: ‘All nations have turned their eyes towards
industry, the sure and inexhaustible source of wealth; and toward
foreign trade, which can give immense extension to industry.’ In 1830,
however, the European economy was predominantly agricultural.
Even in England, where in 1760 agriculture employed between 40 and
50 per cent of the population, it still accounted for 35 per cent in 1800
and 25 per cent in 1830. Nowhere else was this proportion as low:
in Italy and France 60 per cent of the population was rural in 1830,
in Prussia over 70 per cent, in Spain 90 per cent, and in Russia and
generally in eastern Europe 95 per cent.
Nevertheless, cities and towns were growing in size, and were slowly
absorbing an increasing proportion of total population. By 1830 there
were in Europe perhaps twenty-five cities of over 100,000 people
(including four in England and one in Scotland), and London, with
almost a million in 1800, had now a million and a half; Paris had over
three-quarters of a million; Constantinople perhaps half a million;
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St Petersburg and Naples more than 300,000; Vienna, Moscow, Berlin,
Amsterdam and Dublin over 200,000 ; and Hamburg, Warsaw, Milan,
Rome, Madrid, Palermo, Venice, Lyons, Budapest, Marseilles and
Barcelona more than 100,000 each. The distribution of towns and of
population in Europe, however, was little different in 1830 from what it
had been in the middle of the fifteenth century. Towns were spread
fairly evenly over the countryside, and served mainly as centres of
industry, commerce and administration for their surrounding districts.
Only in three areas was there marked concentration — in northern Italy,
in the Low Countries, and in England — and only in England in this
period was there a marked change in distribution (towards the midlands
and north) together with a marked increase in town population. In
Europe the distribution of towns and of population was still largely
determined by agriculture; in England concentration was already linked
closely to coal. In Europe the main urban growth was in capital cities;
in England, it was widely dispersed. In Europe there remained the
tendency, that had been general in 1750, towards uniform population
density over wide areas, varying in most countries between sixty and
ninety persons per square mile (with Belgium and Italy higher, and
Spain lower); in England distribution was concentrated, outside of
London, in the Birmingham-Liverpool-Hull triangle, without depopu-
lation of agricultural counties in this period but with a noticeable drift
of the increasing population to this growing industrial area.
The continued dependence on agriculture and the slow growth of
cities, however, is no measure of economic change before 1830. Perhaps
the outstanding economic fact of the previous century had been the
increase in Europe’s population. This grew from about xoo to 140
millions between 1650 and 1750, to 187 millions by 1800, to 274 millions
by 1850. The average annual rate of growth had been 0 3 per cent
before 1750; by 1900 it was 1*2 per cent. Although the increase was
general throughout Europe, it varied in degree from country to country:
between 1750 and 1850 England grew fastest — on average 1 per cent per
annum; Prussia, Italy and Spain, for example, grew at about half that
rate. Between 1800 and 1850 the rate of growth in England reached
1-5 per cent per annum, and in the period 1780 to 1830 a large part of
Europe’s population was growing at a rate that would have doubled
population by 1900. 1 No certainty exists about the immediate causes
of this increase — increasing fertility and/or decreasing mortality — or
about the ultimate social and economic factors that determined those
social indices. As a European phenomenon, and one that began early
1 Population (in millions):
Year
Russia
Austria
France
Germany
Britain
Italy
Spain
1800
c. 40
28
28
23
15
18
15
1830
c. 57
36
35
35
28
25
18
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in the eighteenth century, it cannot be explained, as English historians
have often explained it, by industrialisation. If it was due to declining
mortality, it was certainly not due to improvements in medicine and
hospitals, for these had little effect before the third quarter of the
nineteenth century. If it was due to increasing fertility, it was not due to
a significant change in the age of marriage, for the modem marriage
pattern was already established before industrialisation and urbanisa-
tion. Most demographers would agree, however, that there was a
significant reduction in mortality dining the eighteenth century, and
that this was the primary cause of population increase. The expectation
of life, where the statistics allow estimates, was certainly increasing: in
Sweden between 1755 and 1840 from 33 to 40; in the United States of
America between 1789 and 1850 from 35 to 41. Expectation of life in
France by 1832 was 38 and in England by 1841 was 40. In particular,
more children were surviving, and infant mortality rates were gradually
reduced from their former terrifying levels. After centuries of stable or
slowly growing populations the limits to growth were lifted in the
eighteenth century. The amplitude of the cycle of mortality was
d imini shed as plague and famine lost their intensity, and populations in
consequence no longer underwent periodical decimations.
The gradual decline of plague was perhaps fortuitous — the un-
explained disappearance of the black rat from Europe?— but the
lessening impact of famine was the result of improvements in agricul-
ture. Adam Smith had argued that ‘the cultivation and improvement of
the country . . . must necessarily be prior to the increase of the town’.
The long-run equilibrium of food supply and population (later so
pessimistically analysed by Malthus) meant that the progress of
agriculture was essential for industrial development. The large increase
in population, and the long-run diversion of labour to industry, was
possible only because food production expanded, because both the area
and productivity of cultivation increased. In the eighteenth century
the relationship of population to resources began to change: before
1700 the size of population was determined by the food-production
possibilities of a traditional agriculture, and towns and industry were
concentrated where there was abundant food; after 1700 there was
increased agricultural productivity that, in combination with improved
communications and industrialisation, and increased international and
inter-regional trade, made it possible for Europe to feed its rapidly
growing numbers. The supply of food, hitherto so inflexible that every
harvest failure meant famine and the Malthusian check to population,
was becoming more flexible. The economic conditions that hitherto had
made progressive agriculture profitable only in regions of higher popula-
tion-density were changing, and an increasing demand for food and raw
materials was stimulating increasing production.
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The market force in this change was a sustained upward movement
in prices, especially of grain, after 1750, to a high war level after 1790
that was maintained until 1815. The technical changes that enabled
increased production were: enclosures, the reduction of fallow with
better crop rotations, and the related cultivation of fodder crops; land
reclamation and additions to the area of tillage; and improvements in
techniques and changes in organisation (in the farm unit and in property
and tenurial rights) that increased productivity. Thus, reclamation in
Italy, the Netherlands and France, beginning in the seventeenth and
continuing into the eighteenth century, added arable in the west and
south of Europe; the colonisation of the Ukraine steppes and of the
Caucasus and Transcaucasia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries added vast agricultural areas to Russia in the east; and in
England enclosures and the conversion of pasture added arable in an
area of progressive agriculture.
But not only was more land cultivated, it was cultivated more
efficiently in more places. No period in the history of European agricul-
ture is richer in innovations. 1 The most important invention was the
Brabant plough and its English counterpart the Rotherham plough-
prototype of modern ploughs — that allowed deeper ploughing and the
intensive farming of large estates. Appearing early in the eighteenth
century, it was in wide use by 1800. Deeper ploughing, more manuring
(provided by more livestock) and bed-and-row cultivation (made easier
by the seed drill) made for better crops; better harvesting (with the
increasing use of the scythe, the threshing block and the winnowing
machine) made yields even greater. Equally important were inter-related
crop and livestock improvements: the increasing use of forage and root
crops (for example, clover, lucerne, turnips and potatoes) in better
rotations, more leys {prairies artificielles), and better crop care. All
these increased productivity sufficiently to allow more winter feeding of
livestock, while selective breeding and better animal husbandry in-
creased carcase weights and yields of wool and milk. The increase in
the weight of sheep and cattle slaughtered at Smithfield in London is
well known; equally striking, however, was the increase in milk yields
in Germany and the Netherlands, from less than 150 gallons per cow
during lactation in 1750, up to 220 and even 400 gallons in 1800, with
associated improvements in butter chums and cheese presses. 2 Good
rotations with forage crops had been used for some time in advanced
agricultural districts like Flanders, but they came into more general
use only after 1750.
1 G. E. Fussell, The Farmer's Tools 1 500-1 goo (London, 1952) has shown that there were
only seven important agricultural inventions in the seventeenth century, eight between 1701
and 1750, thirty between 1751 and 1814, and sixteen between 1815 and 1848.
* B. H. Slicher van Bath, De agrarische geschiedenis van West-Europa (500-1850)
(Utrecht/ An twerp, i960); translated by O. Ordish (London, 1963).
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Broadly speaking ‘the old agriculture’ was associated with common
field farming, servile tenures for the cultivators, and subsistence crops:
villages and open fields were the bases of rural life, and in 1750 from
north-east France to the Urals there was little but open fields worked on
a three-field rotation, with co mm on pastures and woodlands and with
primitive equipment. ‘The new agriculture’ tended to be the profit
farming of cash crops (food or industrial raw materials) on small or
medium-sized consolidated farms held on tenures determined by a free
market. Agricultural surplus in the eighteenth century came mainly
from large estates; in the early nineteenth increasingly from the small
farm. In the century 1750 to 1850 the modem pattern of European
agriculture — that of small intensively worked family farms — was
established. ‘The most general spontaneous tendency’ was the spread of
the dispersed farmhouse and the accompanying dissolution of nucleated
villages; for example, the intensive cultivation of small farms in
Belgium, Holland, French Flanders, around Paris, in Tuscany and
Lombardy, and in parts of Portugal and Spain. In Spain, it was said,
‘where small farming prevails, the land is a garden; where estates are
large, a desert.’ England was the exception where the best farming
was on large estates, and where peasant farming was assumed to be,
generally, as wretched as in Ireland. Elsewhere in Europe the persis-
tence of large estates— in Prussia, Poland, Russia, Roumania, Hungary,
southern Italy and southern Spain — was due both to geographical condi-
tions that made intensive farming difficult or uneconomic, and also to
socio-political conditions that strengthened the proprietary rights of the
feudal landlord.
Generally there were moves throughout western Europe to strengthen
the cultivators’ rights to the land, to remove feudal obligations and to
convert ‘inferior’ rights to land into ‘full’ ownership. By 1850 serfdom
had disappeared from Europe except in Russia and Roumania. In this
disappearance the French revolutionaries set a striking example by the
abolition of feudal rights without compensation. This new liberalism,
however, only carried forward what had been partly achieved already
by eighteenth-century princes in their attempts to strengthen royal
authority by pruning the powers of the land-owning aristocracy. And
even earlier feudalism had disappeared from England, and much of
it from France. Between 1790 and 1815 territories dominated or
influenced by France also passed anti-feudal legislation — Holland,
Prussia, Spain and Italy — but the extent of reform, and the compensa-
tion to the feudal landowner, varied. Moreover, there was some
restoration of feudal rights after 1815, for example in Italy and Spain,
with the result that quasi-feudal tenures persisted in southern and eastern
Europe throughout the nineteenth century.
Indeed generalisations of any kind are difficult. Not all land passed,
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by ownership or tenure, into the hands of the peasants; nor were all
farms consolidated; nor were all efficient or even improving. The large
estates of England and of northern France were efficient, as was much
common-field agriculture in south-west Germany; the consolidated
farms of Spain and of south-west France were generally inefficient.
The distribution of land-ownership broadened with the relaxation of
feudal tenures and the commercialisation of farming, but more land
was held in 1830 by metayers or tenants (and short tenures were
common) than by owners. In Belgium the tenant farmer dominated,
in Switzerland the small land-owner, in Lombardy the metayer.
Metayage 1 was probably the most common and the least satisfactory
tenurial arrangement. ‘The metayers never get rich,’ J. C. Loudon
wrote of Lombardy, ‘and are seldom totally ruined; they are not often
changed’. Fragmentation of estates also continued in spite of the
breakdown of communal farming. In Prussia, for example, legislation
was more effective in promoting consolidation than it was in France
where this occurred mainly in the large farms in the north. In the period
1780 to 1830 the only countries where fragmentation was disappearing
were the United Kingdom and Scandinavia. Elsewhere in Europe
farms were often made up of one or more plots, and even as late as
1900 more than one-third of Europe’s farms were fragmented. Similarly,
the size of farms varied even in the same area, although there was a
tendency for medium-sized farms, usually consolidated, in north-west
Europe (for example in Scandinavia), and for a combination of very
large estates and very small farms, with considerable fragmentation, in
the south and east (for example in Sicily). And within national boun-
daries differences were often striking; for example, the contrast between
northern and southern France. Regional differences extended also to
the goods produced, for these reflected the organisation as much as the
fertility of farming units. By 1830 the south of Europe was tending to
specialise in horticulture, the north in animal production, the east in
grain. Generally agriculture was less intensive moving from north-west
to south-east, and this intensity could be measured by the amount of
capital and labour employed, and by the concentration of livestock that
was possible only with intensive fodder-production. In all areas the
stimulus from growing towns was evident. As J. Caird noted later:
‘The production of vegetables and fresh meat, forage, and pasture for
dairy cattle, will necessarily extend as the towns become more numerous
and more populous.’ Grain, requiring less capital, less labour, less care
and more land, was increasingly grown on the periphery of Europe and
shipped inwards and westwards.
1 Metayage is a system of land tenure in which the cultivator pays a proportion (usually
half) of the product as rent to the owner of the land, who furnishes the stock and seed, or
part thereof.
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As tenure, size, intensity and products varied, so did efficiency. In
spite of widespread progress, with notable increases in productivity,
the process was well under way by 1830 that would make European
farms too small, and that would also make generally true the equation
of peasantry and poverty. Acute, even desperate food shortages still
occurred although improved communications made their effects less
deadly. In the south and east there was still dire poverty as agricultural
labourers and peasants eked out subsistence livings on latifundia and
on minute farms. And in those areas the concentration of land-holding
was ‘a sort of provocation of levelling legislative measures’ and the
future source of revolution.
An important stimulus for agricultural development was the in-
creasing demand for agricultural products in international trade. For
example, British imports contained only 30 per cent of ‘groceries’ and
raw materials in 1700 and 60 per cent in 1800, while between 1814 and
1845 foodstuffs averaged 28 per cent and raw materials 67 per cent of
total imports. The significance of growing home markets for agricultural
products in this period is well illustrated by the rapid increase in the
production of sugar-beet and potatoes; and that of a growing inter-
national market by the increase and improvements in wool production,
especially from the spread of the Merino sheep. The first sugar-beet
factory was built in Silesia in 1801 ; by i836European production totalled
750,000 tons. Potatoes were first grown extensively outside Britain in
the last quarter of the eighteenth century: after 1800 their production
increased rapidly in France and Germany until by mid-century they were
becoming part of the staple diet of west Europeans. Increasing wool
production can be measured by British imports, Britain being the
largest manufacturer of woollen cloth: imports averaged 2-5 million lb.
annually from 1776 to 1799 and 35-2 millions from 1830 to 1834, the
main suppliers being Spain until 1820 and Germany thereafter. Intro-
duced into France and Germany in the eighteenth century, the Merino
also provided in both these countries the essential raw material of a
growing domestic wool textile industry.
To support the growing population of Europe, improved com-
munications were just as necessary as the increase in the production of
food. Larger towns and more industry involved the transport not only
of food but of raw materials and manufactured goods; there was an
increase both in the exchange of goods and also of the distances goods
travelled. ‘ Railways, express mails, steamboats, and all possible means
of communication are what the educated world seeks,’ Goethe observed
in 1825. And these means of communication had to be cheaper,
especially for the movement of commodities like minerals that were
heavy in bulk and low in value, so that the value added by transport
costs was not so great as to make specialisation unprofitable. Agricul-
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tural specialisation in the Netherlands after 1816, for example, meant
increasing exports of butter to the United Kingdom, and increasing
imports of grain from the Baltic. In industry massive specialisation
before 1830 was confined to Britain, which could still almost feed her-
self although she was increasingly dependent on imported raw materials:
in 1830 wheat imports were 2-2 million quarters, cotton imports 261-2
million lb., and wool imports 32-3 million lb.
Within Britain (and to a lesser extent in Europe) the increasing use
of coal was the most powerful stimulus to improved communications.
While the consumption of coal was small, it was transported in small
quantities by pack animal and cart, and in larger quantities by river and
sea where pit and market were as fortunately situated as Newcastle and
London. As consumption increased, waterways were first improved
and then constructed specifically to carry coal. The first modern canals
of England were the Sankey Brook from St Helen’s coalfield to the
Mersey (1757) and the Duke of Bridgewater’s from the Worsley mines
to Manchester (1761). Canal building was, of course, an old art in
Europe, but the English canal system was built between 1750 and 1850
in response to new incentives, and after the main river improvements of
the previous century. The canals of England were an essential part of
the increasingly intricate and roundabout processes of manufacture and
distribution. The map of English canals is the map of industrial
England; in 1750 there were only 1000 miles of navigable waterways; by
1850 4250 miles of canals linked the main rivers and industrial towns
with the ports and London.
In Europe also there was a great extension of waterways, but nowhere
except in France and in the Low Countries was there a canal system so
intimately related to economic development as in England. Outside
those areas there was more river improvement than canal building in
the first half of the nineteenth century. In France by 1830 Paris was
linked to the south with the Loire, and to the north with the growing
industries and coal mines of Belgium. In Belgium an elaborate net-
work, partly ancient but greatly extended in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, joined the coal mines of Mons and Charleroi
southwards to Paris and northwards to Brussels, Ghent and Antwerp.
Holland, however, although equipped with many canals, was not linked
with the Belgian system until after 1830, and until then was deprived of
Belgian coal as a vital raw material of development. Elsewhere in Europe
canal building before 1830 was sporadic and nowhere formed part of a
national system of transport as in England.
The improvement of roads was more widespread and economically
less significant than the construction of canals, and the motives for it
were also different. Road improvement, like anti-feudal legislation
before 1789, was very much the product of enlightened despotism, of
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ECONOMIC CHANGE IN ENGLAND AND EUROPE
absolute monarchy and economic nationalism. Thus, for example, the
need felt by central authorities for good roads, the creation of adminis-
trative and technical bodies to make and maintain roads, the improve-
ments in wheeled vehicles and increased traffic, produced in France by
1780 25,000 miles of classified roads. The French road system, a model
for Europe, was maintained and extended by the military ambitions of
Napoleon beyond the borders of France, into the Low Countries,
Germany and Italy. In Scotland, as in France, the need for roads was
partly military; but in England the motives were more economic, and
the solution more piece-meal. Responsibility for roads after 1750
passed increasingly from local authorities to ad hoc statutory Turnpike
Trusts of which 3783 existed in 1829. British roads were improved, and
the road-making techniques of Telford and McAdam were widely used
outside Britain; but with the rapid growth of canals, roads played
only a minor role in the bulk transport of food, raw materials and
manufactured goods. In Europe since the eighteenth century road
improvement had advanced little by 1830, and transport remained a
bottleneck to economic expansion until the development of railways.
But better roads and more canals were not the only transport improve-
ments before 1830; important developments in the techniques of carry-
ing commodities culminated after 1830 in the locomotive and the steam
ship. There were locomotives by 1 830, but their existence was an example
for the future, not an illustration of present realities. Similarly, although
there was a steam ship on the Clyde in 1812 and one on the Seine in
1822, the last great age of wood and sail lasted into the thirties, and ship
development reached its perfection, not in size but in design, in the fast
clipper. In ship making, copper sheathing of ships’ bottoms and the
increasing use of iron in structure and equipment were important
developments, but in 1830 there were only thirty-nine steam ships,
averaging 87 tons net, registered in the United Kingdom. The change
in shipping was in quantity not in kind, and Europe’s merchant fleet
expanded rapidly between 1780 and 1830. Some measure of this in-
crease can be gauged from the number of ships (British and foreign)
employed in the foreign trade of Great Britain; these increased from
5182 vessels (average 180 tons) to 19,907 (average 146 tons) between
1783 and 1830. There were many more ships on the world’s oceans in
1830, even if their design and size had changed little in fifty years.
‘The central problem of the age,’ T. S. Ashton has written of England,
‘was how to feed and clothe and employ generations of children out-
numbering by far those of any earlier time.’ 1 In retrospect the popula-
tion increase is the most startling feature of the period 1780 to 1830,
but to contemporaries in Europe it was the industrial advance of
England that impressed. In the eighteenth century English superiority
1 T. S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830 (Oxford, 1948), p. 161.
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was attributed to a superior political system, to limited as against
absolute monarchy; in the early nineteenth century almost entirely to
machine technology. In 1740 the phrase ‘a Limitation de l’Angleterre’
was already common, but by 1830 England was ‘the schoolmaster of
industrial Europe’, visited continuously, and sending forth entre-
preneurs, engineers, foremen and operatives to found and to work
industrial concerns throughout Europe. In France the foundations of
most of the great metallurgical enterprises were preceded by visits to
England; in Belgium an English family, the Cockerills, had created by
1830 the largest industrial firm in Europe; the puddling process was
introduced into Germany in 1824 by the Remy and Hoesch families (two
of whose members had studied it in England) with the help of English
puddlers. 1 There was envy of and desire for ‘the marvellous machines’
of England (as J. A. Blanqui called them in 1823), and the prohibition on
the export of British machinery and on the emigration of British artisans
was widely ignored long before it was repealed.
Britain was the first country to experience an industrial revolution,
but the causes of this revolution and the reasons for British leadership
have never been adequately explained. The sharp upward movement
that marked the revolution in industrial production in England occurred
in the decade 1780-90, but this was after eighty years during which
production had been increasing at a rate of 2 per cent per annum and
international trade had quadrupled. By 1780 French development was
also impressive, with a similar rate of growth of industry and, also, a
quadrupling of trade. But there were two important differences. First,
since 1660 British coal mines had been producing five times as much coal
as the combined output of European mines ; production exceeded that
of France thirty times in 1700 and still twenty times in 1800. On the
Continent coal was little used before 1750, and its general use after
1800 came 150 years later than in Britain. Britain’s annual consumption
was already one-half ton per capita in 1700, and had doubled by 1800.
Coal in Britain was the first raw material in history to be measured in
millions of tons; its bulk transport justified massive investment in
canals ; the problems of its mining stimulated the perfection of the steam
engine; it was the fuel essential for the mass production of iron — without
which there could have been no industrial revolution, and of bricks —
without which housing could never have kept pace with population. A
second difference was less tangible, but even more decisive. In Britain
industrial and commercial development was spontaneous; in France,
and in other countries, it was tinged with artificiality, the result of the
efforts of absolute monarchs for conspicuous consumption and economic
nationalism. In France, for example, varying degrees of State ownership
1 See W. O. Henderson, Britain and Industrial Europe , 1750-1870 (Liverpool University
Press, 1954), for a detailed account of the activities of the British in European industry.
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ECONOMIC CHANGE IN ENGLAND AND EUROPE
or aid created a hierarchy of manufacturing concerns. 1 In Britain there
were also privileged companies, but generally the market and not the
government determined the profitability and hence the survival of
industrial concerns.
Freedom of enterprise, however, was only one characteristic of a
social environment in Britain that was more favourable to economic
change than elsewhere: an environment in which there was political
stability and social mobility, the general acceptance of a secular and
individualist philosophy, a widespread knowledge of science and
technology, and greater security for person and property than in
Europe. Although other countries had shared in the secularisation of
life and in the advance of science, and, with the enlightenment, in the
liberalising of economic and social affairs, yet Britain, compared with
France, had progressed much farther in the breakdown of economic
regulation and of corporate enterprise; compared with Germany, she
had the advantages of a national unity — and hence of an integrated
market — that had been already maintained for centuries; compared
with Holland, she had coal and iron in abundance. The English,
declared Montesquieu, ‘had progressed farthest of all peoples in three
important ways, piety, commerce, and freedom.’ Not one of Britain’s
advantages over her potential rivals for early industrialisation was
unique, but together they formed a constellation that was. Given a
social and political climate that did not impede innovation, industry and
commerce that were already advanced, geographical advantages (coal
and iron ore, a favourable location, short hauls for all transport), the
economic pre-requisites of sufficient capital and expanding markets, then
the siting of the first industrial revolution in Britain is not surprising.
A list of advantages, however, is not an explanation, and the general
rise in productivity that characterised the industrial revolution was
bewilderingly complex in causes, sequence and composition. Only one
thing is reasonably certain: the turning point. After 1780 the production
of industrial goods increased markedly, and the technological bases of
this increase can be identified : the rapid introduction of the puddling
process, the rotary motion steam engine, and improved cotton spinning
machinery. On the long-term causes of the English industrial revolution,
contemporary and nineteenth-century explanation stressed four factors:
the change in economic policy from mercantilism to laisser faire ,
attributed largely to Adam Smith; the expansion of British commerce;
the increase in productivity that came from the new machines, and,
hence, the engineers and artisans who invented and applied them;
1 W. C. Scoville, Capitalism and French Glassmaking , 1640-1789 (University of California,
t95°)» P- I2 5. identifies four groups: manufactures du roi (state-owned and operated),
manufactures royales (with monopoly privileges and taxation exemptions), manufactures
privilegiees (crown chartered, with some privileges), and below these, establishments without
official recognition or patronage.
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the thrift and dedication of the early entrepreneurs who made available
the capital and hard work necessary for pioneering new industrial pro-
cesses. ‘This country was the first manufacturing state in the world’,
Frankland Lewis declared in the House of Commons in 1816 1 ‘not
because labour was cheaper here than elsewhere, but because our per-
sons and properties were secure — because we had good government —
because we possessed some peculiar national advantages — because we
had coals in abundance — because we had machinery and mechanical
ingenuity — because, from our situation, we were not liable to the
devastations of war which interrupt the progress of all improvement in
countries exposed to its fury — and, above all, because we had a vast
accumulation of capital, in which no other country could compete with
us, and which would not seek employment under laws that yielded a
more uncertain production.’
Adam Smith’s arguments for laisser faire certainly influenced
eighteenth-century politicians, and were the declared bases of public
policy in the ni neteenth century, but it is not possible to attribute to
him any direct influence on industrialisation in 1780. At this time he
was but one of many, in England and on the Continent, who were
proclaiming that more liberal economic policies were necessary for
economic growth. More important, certainly, were capital accumula-
tion and inventions. It is T. S. Ashton’s thesis, for example, that ‘the
lower rate of interest at which capital could be obtained’ was the reason
‘why the pace of economic development quickened about the middle of
the eighteenth century’. Interest rates fell from 7 or 8 per cent at the
beginning of the century to 3 or 4 per cent in 1750, and this was cer-
tainly important for land-owners who wished to enclose, and for canal
and road builders, even though the new industrialists increased their
capital assets mainly by ploughing back profits. The development of
English banking was also remarkable, with 52 private banks in London
and 400 in the provinces by 1800, which between them were responsible
for much of the working capital of industry. Capital was necessary for
development, and capital was more plentiful and cheaper in Britain in
the second half of the eighteenth century than in any other country
except Holland.
The immediate cause of increasing productivity, however, was un-
doubtedly tec h nical progress: the use of power-driven machinery; the
replacement of wood by coal as a fuel, and by iron as construction
material; the transfer of production to the factory; improved com-
munications. The effect of better machinery on productivity during the
industrial revolution was both large and rapid in impact. ‘In my
establishment at New Lanark,’ Robert Owen declared in 1816, ‘mech-
anical powers and operations superintended by about two thousand
1 Hansard, xxxiv, 778.
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young persons and adults . . . now completed as much work as sixty
years before would have required the entire working population of
Scotland.’ Such improvements explain the shift between 1760 and 1830
from a situation where incomes and population were rising very slowly
to one where population was increasing at the annual rate of 1-5 per
cent, and average real incomes at the same rate.
‘The greatest stimulus to English engineering,’ Samuel Smiles
declared, ‘has been Trade — the increase of our commerce at home, and
the extending of it abroad.’ The industrial revolution with its great
increase in production would not have been possible without the
existence of large and accessible markets, at home and abroad, of
consumers willing and able to buy the new products of industry. This
extension of markets was made possible, particularly, by reduced prices,
for the goods of the industrial revolution tended to be cheap and
plentiful. Perhaps the most important discovery of the British entre-
preneurs was the mass market in which sales of machine-made cheap
goods at low profit-margins proved to be a more general foundation of
wealth than the higher profits on the smaller sales of quality goods.
The process and sequence of growth in Britain can now be described.
Starting with a stable but relatively advanced economy that was mainly
agricultural — but with a significant industrial sector, especially textiles,
and a mature commercial organisation biased towards international
trade — Britain in the early eighteenth century was slowly changing its
production methods in both agriculture and industry, but was saving
little more than was required to meet depreciation and modest additions
to fixed capital. With a slowly increasing population, and no other
great impulse to change, entrepreneurial talent found its main outlet in
commerce, and the merchants became, as P. Mantoux described them,
les excitateurs de V Industrie} They accumulated capital and exploited
the home and foreign markets for agricultural produce and domestic
manufacturers. At this stage, between 1740 and 1780, large-scale
investment in agriculture, and to a lesser extent in communications,
greatly enhanced the industrial potential of the economy and made
possible the cumulative expansion after 1780. The population increase
and the expansion of domestic and international trade after 1740 gave
further stimulus, and the application of radically new production
methods and the increasing proportion of the national income devoted
to productive investment, enabled the economy to yield a rise in real
output per capita that was sustained. Whereas total output was in-
creasing after 1740, output per capita moved up sharply only after 1780;
whereas the rate of growth of real income per capita had increased
0-3 per cent per annum between 1700 and 1750, it increased to 0-45 per
cent between 1750 and 1800, to i-i per cent between 1801 and 1831, to
1 P. Mantoux, La revolution industrielle au 18° siecle (Paris, 1906 ).
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WAR AND PEACE IN AN AGE OF UPHEAVAL
I -5 per cent between 1831 and 1851. Between 1782 and 1855 the rate of
growth of industrial output varied from 2 to 4 per cent per annum,
more than double the rate before 1780, and between 1800 and 1830
real national income per capita increased 50 per cent. The growth of
domestic income, evident after 1730, provided the main market stimulus
for growth, and, through the demand for colonial produce, the impetus
for increasing colonial trade after 1740. The volume of international
trade doubled between 1780 and 1800, and, after a slower growth
during the wars, doubled again by 1840. No wonder G. R. Porter could
introduce his book The Progress of the Nation , published in 1836 to
1838, with reference to Britain’s ‘eminence among nations’ and to ‘the
greatest advances in civilisation that can be found recorded in the
annals of mankind’. Much of this progress must be attributed to
agriculture, for although the contribution of manufacturing industry to
national income increased from 20 per cent in 1770 to 25 per cent in
1812 and to 33J per cent in 1831, still between 1780 and 1830 agriculture
contributed, on average, one-third of the national income. This is not
surprising: an agricultural revolution that began in the eighteenth
century allowed the same number of people on the land to feed a total
population that by 1830 had nearly doubled.
In industry the important advances were in the production of textiles
and iron, and in the mining of coal. The growth of the cotton industry
can be measured by the import of raw cotton, by employment (500,000
in 1831, of which about half were in factories), by exports, and by the use
of machinery (10 million spindles and 80,000 power looms by 183 1). 1
The iron industry was revolutionised by the use of coke for smelting,
the puddling and rolling processes, and the steam engine: in 1788, when
total production was about 70,000 tons, at least one-fifth came from
charcoal furnaces; in 1806 there were 162 coke and only n charcoal
furnaces, producing 260,000 tons; by 1830 there were probably 300
coke furnaces in operation with a total yearly production of 700,000
tons. Coal mining productivity was markedly increased by the steam
engine — for both drainage and haulage — and by the railway: pro-
duction, already 2-6 milli on tons in 1700, was 6-4 million by 1780,
101 million by 1800, and 30 million by 1830. A marked feature of
British industrialisation, also, was its concentration on the coal fields,
with practically all cotton manufacturing in Lancashire, and 40 per
cent of iron making in South Wales and another 30 per cent in Stafford-
shire by 1830. Iron and cotton manufactures provided probably less
than 5 per cent of the national income in 1780, more than 10 per cent
1 (i) Raw cotton imports (million lb.): 1771, 4-8; 1785, 17-9; 1790, 31-4; 1800, 56-0;
1811, 90-3; 1821, 137-4; 1831, 273-2.
(ii) Cotton exports : 1820, 250 million yards cloth, 23 million lb. yarn. 1830, 445 million
yards cloth, 65 million lb. yarn.
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in 1810, and about 20 per cent by 1830; cotton goods were 13 per cent
of exports in 1796-8 and 40 per cent in 18x5-25. By 1830 the manu-
facturing industry was as important in the national economy as it was
to be for the rest of the century; and in Lancashire, the West Riding and
the Black Country a new society was being formed, a society that was
predominantly urban and industrial and whose standard of living, in
spite of many ills and some injustice, was slowly rising.
Britain’s international trade after 1780 increased at a faster rate than
industrial production. More significant for the European economy,
however, was the greater growth, relatively and absolutely, of imports:
for most years after 1796 Britain had an unfavourable commodity
trade balance (averaging £9 millions annually to 1830), which was
matched by an expansion of invisibles, the earnings of the merchant
marine (Britain had 40 per cent of the world’s shipping in 1820),
commercial and financial commissions, the savings of Britons abroad
(entrepreneurs, artisans, officials), and the income from foreign invest-
ment (assets abroad totalled £25 millions in 1817 and £113 millions in
1832). Britain’s import surplus underlines two important factors: the
fall in British export prices that followed from mechanisation (and thus
the unfavourable barter terms of trade, and the export to foreigners
of some of the advantages of the industrial revolution in the form of
cheaper manufactured goods); the importance of the British market
to foreign producers of raw materials and foodstuffs both in Europe
and overseas. British trade constituted about 27 per cent of world trade
in 1 800 and 24 per cent in 1840; of non-British exports in world trade
Britain provided a market for 42 per cent in 1800 and 36 per cent in
1840; of imports into all other countries Britain provided about 40 per
cent in 1800 and 25 per cent in 1840. 1
In direction of trade, both before 1780 and after 1830, Britain was
oriented predominantly towards America and Europe: generally over
this period Europe provided one-third of British imports and a market
for more than 40 per cent of her exports, while North America (including
the West Indies) provided over 40 per cent of British imports and a
market for more than one-third of her exports. In composition British
trade established a pattern that later characterised the trade of Europe
with the rest of the world: exports mainly of the new manufactures —
cottons, woollens, iron-ware; imports of raw materials and food-
stuffs — with wheat, wool and cotton constituting 21 per cent of net
imports by volume, and tea, sugar, tobacco, molasses and wines totalling
30 per cent over the period. In Britain between 1800 and 1830 raw
materials increased from 40 to nearly 70 per cent of the volume of
imports, foodstuffs from 20 to nearly 30 per cent, while manufactures
sank to 5 per cent; in exports manufactures increased from 83 to 96 per
1 A. H. Imlah, Economic Elements in the Pax Britannica (Harvard, 1958), ch. 2.
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cent, with cotton goods forming over 40 per cent of exports by 1815.
With Britain as yet the only rapidly industrialising country and by far
the largest trader, a pattern of international specialisation was estab-
lished on the basis of Britain’s demand for primary products. And
imports, at a time when bilateral payments in international trade were
common, were directly reflected in exports; thus, the large north
European market for British manufactured goods fluctuated directly
with British grain imports from the Baltic. Nevertheless, without a
fully developed multilateral system of payments, the eighteenth-century
triangles of trade were extended towards multilateral settlements. Britain,
with an unfavourable trade balance in the United States and Northern
Europe, had a favourable balance elsewhere, in Southern Europe, South
America and Asia. The United States had a favourable balance with
Europe offset by an unfavourable balance with the rest of the world.
Within Europe, for example, Russia and Sweden had favourable
balances with Britain to offset purchases from Southern Europe;
Belgium, France and Germany had a surplus within Europe to offset
deficits overseas, especially with the United States.
Increasingly, since so much of world trade was with Britain, the
complicated pattern of deficits and surpluses that resulted was settled
in London without large flows of bullion. In 1832 Nathan Rothschild
declared that England was in general ‘ the Bank for the whole world
All the transactions in India, in China, in Germany, in the whole world
are guided here and settled in this country.’ Already in 1800 London
was the commercial-financial capital of Europe, providing services of
short- and long-term credit, marine insurance, shipping, merchanting
and entrepot facilities that were unique, even though some continental
cities, Paris and Amsterdam for example, remained important clearing
houses for international settlements. European banking services were
catered for in 1780 by a number of chartered public banks, some
large private merchant banks, and numerous small private deposit
banks. Banking, which had developed initially for the deposit and loan
of money, became increasingly involved during the eighteenth century
in the international transfer of funds, and in the issue of bank-notes.
After 1750 the old deposit banks were giving way to note-issuing banks
of a semi-public character and after 1800 governments were restricting
the right of issue wholly or partly to them : for example, the Bank of
France was given the monopoly of issue in Paris in 1803, and in pro-
vincial towns where it had branches in 1806. By 1830 England, the
United Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Prussia, France and
Spain all had privileged national banks of issue. At the same time com-
mercial and investment banks, and the English country banks, were
emerging to provide for, and profit by, the increasing demand for
currency and credit caused by economic development. The need for
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trade credit and improved machinery for the remittance of trade
balances was the main stimulus; but also important were the needs of
governments for funds, both short and long, to bridge the time-lag
between the spending and collecting of revenue, and to fund state
debts caused by the persistent and universal imbalance between revenue
and expenditure, especially during war. Indeed banking developed
largely in this period on the business of accepting deposits and buying
commercial or government bills to hold against them. English banks
usually avoided long-term commitments to industry, but on the Con-
tinent there was also the beginning of investment banking, for example
in Belgium.
Equally significant for the future was the establishment of inter-
national banking houses, centred in London and concerned particularly
with the growth of national debts. The Ouvrard-Baring-Hope combine
managed the loan of 350 million francs to France in 1817, and the
Rothschilds arranged the first Prussian external loan of 1818. By 1825
France, Prussia, Russia, Austria, Portugal, Spain and even the still
unfree Greece all had external debts; and overseas the first large loans
had been made to the impecunious free governments of South America.
The Rothschilds were among the first to respond to the opportunities
afforded by the growth of international finance, having five members of
the family strategically placed in London, Paris, Vienna, Frankfurt and
.Naples in 1815. The approximate total of Europe’s national debts
increased from £500 millions in 1780 to £1500 millions in 1820 and,
more slowly to £1730 millions by 1848.
These various financial developments had their own particular
problems, intensified by the war, of inflations and crises. Inflation not
only raised an important theoretical issue — largely explained by the
postulation of the quantity theory of money — but also the practical
problem of the control of the note issue. Periodical crises, including
extensive bank failures, led to a consideration of the role of banks in
booms and depressions, and to the practical problems of protecting
the public from the instability of financial institutions. The systematic
theorising about monetary problems in England, for example, finally
led in 1844 to an attempt in the Bank Charter Act to control banking
and currency and thus to prevent crises.
The amount of British foreign trade was far greater than that of any
other country. French exports, the next largest, were less than half the
value of British exports in 1830; those of the United Netherlands less
than one-quarter, and those of other European countries much less.
Similarly with the development of industry. Industrialisation in Europe
nowhere matched that of Britain. Generally the amount of trade and
the degree of industrialisation diminished with the distance from
Britain, and the impact of British development was felt most by her
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nearest neighbours. Southern, eastern and northern Europe remained,
in contrast, areas of little change before 1830. In the south — in Spain,
Italy and European Turkey — economies remained agricultural and
primitive, and there was little industrial development except in Catalonia.
In Turkey there was some growth of enclosed farming and craft pro-
duction, stimulated by increasing international trade and a very liberal
trade policy. The Moniteur Ottoman reported in 1832: ‘Good sense,
tolerance, and hospitality have long ago done for the Ottoman Empire
what the other states of Europe are endeavouring to effect by more or
less happy political combinations. Liberty of commerce has reigned
here without limits. . . . The extreme moderation of duties is the
complement of this regime of commercial liberty.’ The possible good
effect of such policy, however, was more than offset by a system of
government that resulted in universal tyranny and insecurity, and made
the main producer of wealth, the cultivator of the soil, the helpless prey
to injustice and oppression. Only a break-down into nation states would
bring quicker development.
Italy’s economic ills, in contrast, stemmed largely from fragmentation,
and until unification she remained ‘a stationary and backward civilisa-
tion’. In the eighteenth century, political divisions, trade barriers,
poor communications, guild restrictions, small markets, currency differ-
ences and the persistence of privilege had reduced a once great economy
almost to subsistence agriculture. Conquest and unification by Napoleon
did bring some positive benefits but these were offset by the blockade
and by French exploitation. After the war, when some of these
benefits could have been realised, the uneasy restoration of privilege
and of the old political boundaries further delayed development.
Only in Lombardy and Piedmont, the natural gateways to the rest
of Europe, was there agricultural and industrial progress that con-
trasted with the rest of Italy, and even here agriculture overshadowed
all other activities, including the feeble beginnings of factory pro-
duction in textiles. Elsewhere there was some textile manufacturing
(machinery was introduced into Prato in 1820, and even in Naples the
first cotton mills were built after 1830), but in the whole of Italy iron
production was small, and coal production nil. Nowhere before 1830
was there an agricultural revolution; and, although irrigation and con-
solidation, and the decline of feudalism, produced some increase in
agricultural production, this growth barely kept pace with that of the
population. The condition of the peasantry was everywhere wretched.
When Sir John Bowring visited Italy in the 1830’s he reported on the
illiteracy, ignorance, superstition, hostility to innovation and ‘the
universal isolation’ of the peasantry. ‘In innumerable cases families
have occupied the same farms for hundreds of years, without adding a
farthing to their wealth, or a fragment to their knowledge.’
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Similarly in Spain, where in spite of the Enlightenment with its
reforming civil servants who believed that the economy could be
improved by legislation, and in spite of the eighty economic societies of
‘Friends of the Country’ and, in consequence, much progressive
economic thinking and some liberalisation of commercial life under
Charles III, the old ills that had reduced her from a leading to a minor
power persisted. Spain remained primarily an agricultural economy, a
producer of raw materials for export — wine, oil, wool, silk and minerals
— in return for grain and manufactured goods, even handkerchiefs from
Manchester on which, as Gautier noted, the faces of celebrated matadors
were garishly printed. The deficit in grain was the most striking
irrationality of the Spanish economy, the result of the seigneurial
system with its poorly farmed latifundia and of the absence generally,
except in the north, of small or medium-sized farms. There was prestige
in stock-breeding — and the power of the pastoral interest was re-
flected in the privileges of the Mesta with its wandering and destructive
sheep flocks, not abolished until 1836 — but little prestige in tenant
farming. There were 25,000 ‘dispirited villages’ but few towns that
were large enough to stimulate intensive agriculture or that could form
the focus of industrial advance. Thus industry languished, partly
because of the smallness of Spanish towns and the failure to exploit the
colonial market, but also because of restrictive guilds lately revived.
The urban middle classes were small in number and held in low esteem
by the nobility; their preference for guilds and protection is under-
standable in an economy where there was little agricultural and even
less industrial surplus, poor communications and limited markets.
Government patronage of industry was not important, as it was in
France. Much of the external commerce was in foreign hands, for
example in Cadiz, and its profits were drained abroad. The empire, ‘a
vast closed territory where commercial relations rested on the strictest
exclusiveness which mercantilist concepts could conceive’, had a larger
and more rapidly expanding economy in 1800 than did Spain, but its
demand for manufactures was met, not by industrialisation in Spain, but
by foreigners, and specially by the British. The war made things worse:
it disrupted government, increased inflation, and interrupted the wool
trade; it finally established Britain in the market for manufactures both
in Spain and in the empire. The empire — a source of bullion and a
market, an avenue of employment for the nobility in a society where one
person in twenty was a noble — had been the bulwark of Spanish
fortunes. The British, in command of the sea and already established
illicitly in the South American market, were alone in the position to take
advantage of colonial independence when it came. To loss of empire
was added an inflation which aggravated existing monetary problems:
prices increased 60 per cent between 1770 and 1800, and more rapidly
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after 1800. And although the French invasion led to the formation of a
liberal government — and to the drafting of a liberal constitution in 181 1
— the war was followed by the restoration of noble privileges and the
retardation of growth. The liberal revolt of 1820 was ineffective, but by
1830 Spain was simmering once more into violence. By this time only
Catalonia, and especially Barcelona, had any substantial industry,
mainly textiles.
In eastern Europe the rate of economic growth was also slower than
in the west. In Russia there was a remarkable five-fold increase in
population between 1720 and 1851, partly due to an extension of
territory in all directions — an extension whose long-term economic
importance lay in acquiring new potential resources and in giving direct
access to the expanding economy of western Europe. There was, also,
considerable industry. Indeed Russia was the scene of perhaps the
most spectacular development of the iron industry in the eighteenth
century: in the Urals by 1800 production was 65,500 tons, half of which
had to be exported, mainly to Britain, because of the lack of domestic
consumers. But this impressive output masked technological backward-
ness, with charcoal furnaces (eighty-seven in 1800) and hand forging.
And, considering the size and population of Russia, the aggregate
effort in industry was less impressive than it seemed, with perhaps 50,000
‘factory’ workers in 1770 and 210,000 in 1825. The trend in factories
was away from serf and towards free labour, but by 1830 only the cotton
industry was using a majority of free workers. The growth of factory
production was accompanied by a decline in estate production which
gradually destroyed a self-sufficiency of feudal estates that was probably
unique in Europe. By 1830, also, there had developed a noticeable
regional specialisation. In the north serfdom was already disappearing
and an increasing percentage of the new industrial crops (for example,
flax, potatoes and hemp) was coming from free peasant production.
On the black soil of the centre and south, serfdom was maintained
although it also produced increasingly for the market, partly to satisfy
the increasing demand of the land-owners for industrial and par-
ticularly imported goods; and this was forcing agricultural change, for
example the wider use of a three-course rotation. Russian exports were
few — iron, flax, tallow, timber, grain; imports were varied — textiles,
metal goods, sugar, wines, oil, and numerous consumer goods, and a
favourable trade balance with Britain allowed the import of the southern
European luxuries that increasingly adorned the noble household. But
the economic advance before 1830 was slow and uneasy, and until the
liberation of the serfs development was inevitably retarded.
In the Austrian Empire enlightenment and reform that might have
engendered economic advance were abruptly halted in 1789. There-
after a feudal reaction followed that, under Francis II, went so far as to
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restrict the building of factories, especially in Vienna. In consequence
industry developed slowly; and, although the blockade stimulated
mechanisation in the cotton industry, peace and cheap English imports
brought crisis and halted production until the late twenties. Progress in
the thirties was rapid: in Bohemia by 1840 hand-spinning had almost
disappeared and the steam engine was widely used. There was change
also in agriculture where the extension of the market stimulated the
greater production of grain (for example in Hungary) and the growing of
new products (for example potatoes, beet and fine wool). But the
restoration of feudal rights by Francis in 1798, and the fact that so
much noble land, especially in Hungary, was entailed, made com-
mercial farming difficult and left wide areas of rich land under-developed
until after 1848. Nevertheless, noble landowners in the chief agricultural
areas did push profitable large-scale farming and agrarian reform after
1815. By 1830 the use of machinery in Austrian territories was confined
to the textile industry (and mainly to cotton spinning in Bohemia);
and mechanisation in other industries — iron making and sugar pro-
duction — only commenced in the following decade.
In northern Europe the Baltic, once one of the great centres of
European commerce, had declined in importance, with a trade now in
iron, timber and grain. The Scandinavian economies were mainly
agricultural, but there were marked improvements in agriculture during
this period, with changes in land tenure, and the establishment of
dispersed farms with yeoman-like freeholds and efficient medium-sized
farming units. Industry, however, except for the Swedish iron industry,
remained small in scale, and guild power, though reduced, was still
strong throughout the period. British example in iron making and
British demand for iron and timber were important incentives to
industrial production. Swedish development was the most impressive:
production of grain increased so that by 1830 the country hardly needed
to import it; iron production grew from 60,000 tons in 1750 to 80,000
tons per annum between 1781 and 1830, although Sweden’s percentage
contribution to European iron production fell from 10 to 2 per cent
between 1800 and 1850. Though the Swedish iron masters led in
enterprise, rapidly adopting the puddling process, introducing the first
steam engine in 1804 and making increasing use of water power, they
could not compete with British coke-smelted iron. Second in importance
was timber milling, with exports increasing 60 per cent between 1780
and 1830. Both iron and timber found their chief market in Britain,
and growth would have been faster had it not been for the war, the rapid
development of the British iron industry, and the British protection of
Canadian timber. Nevertheless, the impression of Sweden in 1830 is of
a country that was politically stable and moderately progressive in its
economy (tariffs were liberalised in the twenties), with an improving
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agriculture, the beginnings of better communications (for example the
Gotha canal), two metropolitan centres of importance, and two growth
sectors in timber and iron that would later stimulate more rapid
expansion.
Norway, transferred from Denmark to Sweden in 1814, had an
agricultural economy, exporting timber, fish and some metals. Its
resources, except timber, were more limited than those of Sweden,
and the development of the timber industry was hampered by monopolies
and by the restriction of output through fear of deforestation. Already
by 1800, however, the greater part of the land was owned by the farmers,
and the civil administration was in the hands of men of non-noble
descent. After the war there was an expansion of arable (though the
country remained dependent on grain imports), of timber felling, and of
seal and whale fishing, but no signs of real growth by 1830. The
prosperity of Denmark lay already in the export of food, especially
grain, although in this period commerce and the carrying trade were
also important. Denmark controlled the entrance to the Baltic, exact-
ing a toll for transit that was maintained until 1857; she had also 700
ships in 1800 and 1600 in 1839; Copenhagen was an important centre
for Baltic trade; the reform of the tariff and the early establishment of
bonded warehouses (1793) encouraged a transit trade. The end of the
war brought the inevitable British competition, but Denmark’s need for
the British market led in 1824 to a commercial treaty on the basis
of reciprocity. Agricultural advance, with the process of farm con-
solidation practically completed by 1830, gave Denmark a relatively
prosperous if not progressive economy by that date.
The greatest economic advance in continental Europe was in Belgium,
although France and Germany also made significant progress. The
economic greatness of Germany, however, was barely apparent in 1830.
Voltaire’s prophecy that Germany was doomed to eternal poverty
seemed to be justified by the wars and the Prussian depression of 1815
to 1828. And although the reduced number of states and the great
size of Prussia mitigated German atomism, industrialisation was not
possible without a customs union as the minimum step towards unifica-
tion. Competition from the new industries of Belgium and Britain dis-
couraged growth in those old German industries, linen and iron
making, that were the most progressive and had the widest markets. The
dominance of the Junkers in agriculture, and of the guilds in industry,
reinforced an institutional structure inimical to growth. Yet increasing
industrialisation after 1815 was the result of agrarian reform and of the
removal of customs barriers. The changes that abolished serfdom and
the guild-regulation of industry were initiated before 1815; the break-
down of inter-state customs barriers came with the formation of the
Zollverein between 1818 and 1834. Germany had coal and iron resources
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that would later provide the raw materials for the greatest heavy industry
of Europe, but before 1830 they were little exploited. Of her two largest
coal-fields, the Ruhr was little developed in this period because its wealth
was unknown and because of its proximity to Belgian coal-iron works,
while that of Upper Silesia, isolated as it was, would not have developed
at all without the patronage of the Prussian government. Iron smelting,
in consequence, remained mainly dependent on charcoal. Coke smelt-
ing and puddling were introduced into Upper Silesia as early as the
I78o’s, but not extensively elsewhere before the middle of the nineteenth
century. And even there coke smelting was used only near the coal
mines; elsewhere in Silesia, because of the abundance of timber, char-
coal smelting survived even longer than in other parts of Germany.
The hills east of the Rhine were the most important for the manu-
facture of metal goods and in 1840 still provided one-third of German
blast furnaces. An iron industry that had been widely spread through-
out central Germany suffered competition and decline in the early
nineteenth century owing to cheaper iron from the Ruhr, Silesia and
abroad. If Germany’s future lay with coal and iron, however, her past
and present lay with woollen and linen textiles. Linen was the main
industry in 1800, when Prussian exports contained 75 per cent of
textiles, including 60 per cent of linens, and only 4 per cent of metal
goods. The Silesian-Westphalian linen, in particular, was esteemed
throughout Europe. The basic exports from the Baltic ports — cereals,
timber and cloth — all suffered in the post-war period. Linen exports,
which had gone mainly to Spain, England and America, were competing
after 1815 with cheap British linens and cottons, and declining exports
led to continuous social distress among the hand-loom linen weavers.
But the manufacture of woollens was also an ancient German industry
that increased considerably after the introduction of the Merino sheep
in the eighteenth century. Even so there were large exports of raw wool
to Yorkshire between 1820 and 1840. Cotton manufacture, a new
industry, grew rapidly after 1800, with increasing mechanisation in
spinning after 1815 and 150,000 spindles by 1835. Three great in-
stitutional reforms — the abolition of serfdom, the curtailing of guild
power, and the formation of the Zollverein, together with the immigra-
tion of Belgian and British entrepreneurs and artisans, and state enter-
prise and patronage — explain the economic advance of Germany
before 1830. At that date, however, the economy remained pre-
dominantly rural, even in those states (Rhineland, Westphalia and
Saxony) where industry was most advanced. Economic unification was
necessary to create an internal market large enough to support specialisa-
tion, and to prevent, as a supporter of unification argued in 1814, the
creation of ‘ vineyards along the Baltic, cornfields in the Harz Mountains,
or sheep farming on the hills of the Rhine’.
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In 1783 the area known as the Low Countries consisted of the Austrian
Netherlands (Belgium), the United Provinces (Holland), and the
Principality of Liege. Belgium was the first European country to have
an industrial revolution and was the gateway through which England’s
industrial revolution first entered the Continent. The basic reasons for
Belgian industrial eminence were a favourable location that gave access
to three great and increasing markets (France, Germany and Great
Britain); navigable rivers supplemented by canals to provide in 1830
over 1,000 miles of internal waterways, giving Belgium a unique link
with the Great Plain of western Europe; easily exploited coal and iron
ore which, though not rivalling the resources of Britain or Germany,
were sufficient to begin and sustain an industrial revolution; an ancient
industrial tradition in both textiles and metallurgy that provided a
skilled labour force; and in Antwerp a great commercial and financial
centre. To these advantages were added successive benevolent govern-
ments: incorporation with France brought better roads, the opening up
of the Scheldt, and a long period of ‘peace’ in a protected market at a
time when demand for textiles and metal goods was increasing rapidly;
incorporation with Holland after 1815 led to judicious industrial
expansion in the twenties under the wise patronage of William I.
Government patronage of industry was both direct — loans by William
and the state, and indirect — a moderate tariff and financial institutions
to aid industry; such encouragement, for example, did much to establish
a prosperous iron industry by 1830. Belgium in 1780 already had a
large urban community and, to feed it, a Flemish agriculture as efficient
as that of England. Although the peace in 1815 led to the separation
from Belgium of the French and Rhenish markets and to the opening
up of European markets to British goods, there was compensation after
1820 with modest tariffs, government grants to industry, and canal
development. Rapid technological advance was assured in 1821 by the
sending of Lieutenant Roentgen to report on the English iron industry
and to compare it with that of Belgium. Roentgen found only one
Belgian ironworks — that of John Cockerill at Seraing near Liege — as
good as those of England, and advised a state-owned and operated
factory equipped with English plant and worked initially by English
technicians. Instead Cockerill was twice given large government loans
to expand his works. The Cockerill establishment, one of the first
vertically integrated organisations in Europe, was expanded by an
entrepreneur of outstanding talent into an industrial empire that in 1830
was the largest in Europe. Belgium, like England, was also a large coal
producer, and production increased after 1790 with the general ex-
pansion of industry, reaching 2-5 million tons by 1830. The textile
industry also expanded rapidly, with twice as many cotton spindles and
three times as many looms in 1829 as in 1810. However, it was the
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combination of coal and iron ores along the Meuse that provided the
main bases for Belgian expansion. Even so, charcoal smelting gave way
to coke smelting only slowly, the first coke-fired blast furnaces being
built after 1820 at Grivengee by Orban and at Seraing by Cockerill.
Even in 1842 only 45 of Belgium’s 120 furnaces were coke-fired.
Important for industrial development was the expansion of banking to
provide credit and capital, anticipating the close link between industry
and banking that was later characteristic of Germany. In particular,
the establishment in 1822 of the Societe Generate des Pays-Bas pour
favoriser Vindustrie nationale (to give credit to industrialists) and the
Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij (to foster exports) prevented any
financial bottlenecks to industrialisation and commerce. By 1840, again
in spite of the dislocation caused by the secession, Belgium was tech-
nologically the most advanced country on the Continent, producing
steamboats, locomotives and textile machinery as well as consumer
goods, ‘the one country in Europe’, as J. H. Clapham pointed out,
‘which kept pace industrially with England’.
Whereas Belgium prospered under France and under William I,
Holland on the whole suffered. The Dutch commercial economy was
already falling behind in the eighteenth century. The last Anglo-Dutch
War began the final decline, by harming the still important American
and Oriental trades and by reducing the Dutch mercantile marine; the
Napoleonic period saw the loss of colonies and more ships, and the
permanent eclipse of Dutch commerce. It was the aim of William I ‘to
make the Netherlands once more the stapling place for a not incon-
considerable part of world trade, to which this Kingdom has a claim by
virtue of its location’, but his benevolent policy was doomed to failure.
Irreconcilable differences in policy between Belgian interests for pro-
tection and Dutch interests for free trade made a unified policy for the
combined countries impossible. The roads, canals and harbours built
by William I benefited Belgium immediately, and Holland only in the
long run. The idea of a unified state — with an industrial Belgium and a
commercial Holland, and a useful empire — might well have succeeded
had political unity been maintained. But the 1830 revolution left
Belgium temporarily without markets, and Holland more permanently
without industries. The attempt to revive Holland as an entrepot had
only small success: in the nineties Hamburg monopolised the com-
mission trade in British merchandise; from 1800 to 1815, though trade
continued behind the blockade, Holland was deprived of her traditional
products of commerce; after 1815 tariffs and English competition made
former markets difficult to regain. William’s solution — to channel
trade through a monolithic trading company — was a failure. The old
staples — spices and sugar, herrings and linen — were being replaced by
coal, iron and cotton, and these were not Dutch preserves. The future
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of Rotterdam and Antwerp was assured, but that of the smaller ports lay
more as market towns for agricultural areas than as international
emporia. Holland turned inevitably from commerce to agriculture, and
the French abolition in 1801 and 1804 of feudal privileges aided the
growth of a commercial agriculture that was already contributing
substantially to Dutch trade by 1830.
France, the most populous and richest country of western Europe
in the eighteenth century, was outstripped by Britain after 1780. Even
before this, greater capital accumulation, more productive investment in
industry, and better-developed financial institutions had put Britain
ahead. In France the strength of the guilds, burdensome taxation, and a
restrictive system of commerce and navigation had also hampered
development. War widened further the gap between the economies of
the two countries. Looking at the Europe of 1800, Michelet saw the
masses streaming in France towards the barracks, and in England
towards the factories. In agriculture, which continued to dominate the
French economy, the most striking characteristics were ‘stability and
immobility’. Nevertheless, although basic food crops remained most
important, the demand of metropolitan centres began an agricultural
revolution — with its artificial pastures, root crops, enclosures and animal
improvements— starting near Paris after 1750 and spreading slowly
without radically affecting agriculture until the building of the railways.
The Physiocrats, holding that ‘the wealth of a country is in direct
proportion to the fertility of its land’, had stimulated agricultural
improvements by the government and by large land-holders. Indeed,
many of the rural nobility of the eighteenth century built their wealth
on the proper management of their estates, in response to the increasing
market, rather than on seigneurial rights. But markets seldom extended
beyond provincial borders, and the only great specialisation was in
wine-growing. In the poorer soils of the south biennial rotations were
maintained beyond 1830; elsewhere rotations were triennial but not
advanced except near Paris and in French Flanders. Even before 1789
proprietorship of land was widely spread, with peasant owners numer-
ous everywhere. The Revolution, being concerned mainly with legal
and proprietary relationships, led to a great exchange of property, but
did not greatly affect the methods of farming. Indeed, except in the
cultivation of potatoes and sugar-beet, there was no great change in
agriculture before 1830. The story in industry is the same. Until the
railways, and notwithstanding road and canal building, the economic
provincialism of France with its dispersed small-scale domestic industry
persisted. In the eighteenth century coal production was relatively
large, but it was obtained from scattered fields and was used locally,
mostly on the Massif Central and its borders. After 1760 St Etienne
coal was reaching Paris by way of the Loire, and total French pro-
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duction was 500,000 tons in 1789 and 1,800,000 tons in 1830. But the
slow adoption of the steam engine, the continued use of charcoal for
iron smelting (aided by tariffs after 1819 that aimed at keeping up char-
coal prices in the interest of landowners) and easy access to Belgian coal
restricted output before 1840. Iron manufacture was hampered in the
eighteenth century by fuel shortage and administrative caprice, and most
works were small, although the industry was widespread from the
Pyrenees to the Belgian border. This geographical diversity still existed
in 1827, when there were 424 blast furnaces spread over 45 departments;
the units were small, producing 340,000 tons including only 40,000 tons
by the puddling process. In 1830, 86 per cent of iron was still charcoal-
smelted. There was greater change in the textile industries — for
example in the manufacture of cotton and woollen textiles in the
northern departments — but no revolution except in the cotton industry
of Mulhouse between 1815 and 1830, when there were half a million
spindles and 2000 power looms in operation. French cotton con-
sumption totalled 70 million lb. by 1830. Change in woollen manu-
facture was slower; in silk, slower still. The general technical back-
wardness of French industry can be measured by the fact that there
were only 2803 steam engines in France in 1840. Whereas the war had
helped Britain’s industrialisation, it had deprived France of her colonial
markets without compensating her with permanent European markets,
and had encouraged protected industry behind the Continental System
and within the administrative framework of the Napoleonic empire.
In the competitive post-war world, with British goods freely entering
Europe, only the French cotton industry grew quickly.
Thus the period 1780 to 1830 was not one of general European
industrialisation, although there was significant and widespread
development in the coal, iron and textile industries. An industrial
revolution outside of Britain occurred generally only in cotton textiles,
and here continental consumption of cotton was almost three-quarters
that of Britain by 1830. At this date, however, Britain was still pro-
ducing 80 per cent of Europe’s coal and 50 per cent of Europe’s iron,
and almost all Europe’s steam engines. Generally, therefore, this was a
period of increasing population and trade rather than of industrialisa-
tion, and it was ‘the devouring principle of trade’, especially British
trade, that was the main stimulus to economic growth. ‘Where there is
no English commerce’, it was said, ‘there is no commerce at all.’ It
was a period also of expectations; and Britain, envied and copied,
encouraged that optimism and belief in progress that became character-
istic of the nineteenth century. The French Revolution had raised
acutely the problem of class relations and the threat of class conflict;
the industrial revolution, although it underlined the contrast between
rich and poor, promised plenty for all. Both revolutions helped to
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break down the stratified social hierarchy of the ancien regime, and both
encouraged a political and economic liberalism that led to the replace-
ment of juridical by economic distinctions as the bases of social roles,
and to laisser faire as the basis of public policy. Rearguard actions by
old interests to maintain the status quo might delay, but they could not
prevent, the change that freed and expanded private interests against the
old protecting and restrictive authorities. Economic liberalism resulted
in the withering away of the guild system in industry (assisted by legisla-
tion), the greater freedom of the individual (to own and dispose of
property, and to move from place to place in response to economic
opportunity), and the freeing of trade. Manufacturers and merchants
were soon organised into pressure groups to influence public policy, and
two famous petitions for freer trade, from the German ‘Commercial
and Industrial Union’ in 1819 and from the ‘Merchants of London’
in 1820, were characteristic of their efforts. At the beginning of the
period, 1783 to 1793, the whole of Europe was negotiating for trade
concessions, and after interruptions by the wars negotiations continued
after 1815. The advantages of free trade and of laisser faire were
‘proved’ by the new science of political economy, as expounded by
Adam Smith and the classical economists. The liberal influence of
Smith was universal, with French, German, Italian, Spanish and
Danish translations of The Wealth of Nations appearing before 1800.
Smith not only attacked mercantilism, but also gave to the liberals the
theory of the harmony of economic interests in a world of free com-
petition in which an ‘invisible hand’ could operate. Smith’s optimism
was reinforced by J. B. Say’s law of markets that emphasised supply,
postulating that production finances consumption, and supply creates its
own demand. The influence of T. R. Malthus and D. Ricardo was less
optimistic. They believed that all costs could be reduced to labour
costs, and explained how capital accumulation and population increase
would raise the rent of land until the law of diminishing returns reduced
profits and savings and resulted in a static subsistence-wage economy.
Thus, although the classical economists justified laisser faire, they also
provided the theoretical basis, in the conflict of interests between
landlord, capitalist and worker implicit in the Ricardian system, for
Marxian economics and for the theory of class war. And since there
was working-class discontent and violence, the theory seemed proved.
Social unrest, however, was the product of discontent with status
and with the distribution of wealth in societies in which the working
class was gradually attaining economic and political self-consciousness.
Ability as well as birth was now more generally a means of advance-
ment, and never in history were so many humble men raised from
poverty to riches and power. Yet never was there so much questioning of
existing ideas and institutions; never more plans for the future ordering
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of society. Urbanisation, factories and better communications made
working-class association easier. Civil disorder, partly the result of
economic discontent — for example the fear of machines, and partly the
result of revolutionary ideas — for example from Babeuf, Saint-Simon
and Fourier, led to reaction and suppression; but it helped also the
radicals and humanitarians of the middle and upper classes who argued
for social reform and for a more active role by government to regulate
conditions of work in the new industry. By the 1830’s there was general
agreement with Lamartine, that ‘the proletarian question is one that
will cause the most terrible explosion in present-day society, if society
and government decline to fathom and resolve it’. Already the first
factory acts had been passed in England, and these provided an example
for other countries soon to follow. In any case the condition of the
working class was improving: real wages in England in 1830 were
50 per cent higher than they had been in 1780, and in 1840 a committee
set up by Louis Philippe showed also that the French working class was
certainly better off than it had been before the Revolution. Elsewhere,
except in Belgium, the improvement was not marked; but, wherever
there was an increasing proportion of the occupied population in
industry and commerce, the standard of life and the way of life were
changing for the better. As Macaulay declared of England in 1830:
‘Yet is the country poorer than in 1790? We firmly believe that, in
spite of all the misgovernment of her rulers, she has been almost con-
stantly becoming richer and richer. Now and then there has been a
stoppage, now and then a short retrogression; but as to the general
tendency there can be no doubt. A single breaker may recede; but the
tide is evidently coming in.’
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CHAPTER III
ARMED FORCES AND THE ART OF WAR
A. ARMIES
I N the eighth book of his classic On War Clausewitz describes what
he understood to be the revolution in warfare which had taken place
in his own lifetime. The wars of the eighteenth century, he says, were
wars of kings not of peoples. National existence was not at stake (as
certainly it was for Prussia after Austerlitz and Jena) but simply the
conquest of an enemy province or two. Wars of this kind were affairs
of the State, an autocratic State, and entirely separated from the inter-
ests of the people. Violence was restricted by calculation. In fact, this
was what the twentieth century has come to call ‘limited war’.
After 1 789, however, there was a profound change. Clausewitz goes on :
Whilst, according to the usual way of seeing things, all hopes were placed on a very
limited military force in 1793, such a force as no one had any conception of made
its appearance. War had again suddenly become an affair of the people, and that of
a people numbering thirty millions, every one of whom regarded himself as a citizen
of the State. ...
After all this was perfected by the hand of Buonaparte, this military power, based
on the strength of the whole nation, marched over Europe, smashing everything in
pieces so surely and certainly, that where it only encountered the old-fashioned
Armies the result was not doubtful for a moment. A reaction, however, awoke in
due time. [Elsewhere] the War became of itself an affair of the people. . . .
Therefore, since the time of Buonaparte, War, through being first on the one side,
then again on the other, an affair of the whole Nation, has assumed quite a new
nature. . . - 1
In military, as in other matters, a basic problem for the historian of the
years after 1789 is to distinguish between what was genuinely revolu-
tionary and what had been developing gradually in the eighteenth
century or even earlier. Clausewitz, as an eye-witness of the wars of
the Revolution and Napoleon, had no doubt where the line of dis-
tinction lay. For him the contemporary armies of the Great Powers were,
as they had been generally throughout the eighteenth century, much
alike in discipline, training, equipment and general fitness for service.
What, as he saw it, had transformed the limited wars of the eighteenth
century into the total war of his own time was the infusion of a national
spirit into fighting and the consequent warring of whole nations, one
against the other. The objects of war, the size of armies, and the
geographic scale of operations had all, as it were, been inflated by the
1 C. Von Clausewitz, On War, trans. by Col. J. J. Graham, 3 vols. (London, 1873),
vol. in, pp. 54-5
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new spirit. War had become an affair of the whole nation. As a result,
the restrictions of limited war had been overthrown. The object of
fighting had now become ‘the downfall of the foe; and not until the
enemy lay powerless on the ground was it supposed to be possible to
stop or to come to any understanding with respect to the mutual objects
of the contest’.
It is difficult to disagree with Clausewitz’s view. What was revolu-
tionary in the wars of this period arose not from changes in weapons and
only to a limited extent from new tactical forms and methods. It arose
from the appearance of the ‘ nation in arms ’ ; from the great increase
in the size of armies which that phenomenon made possible; and from
the new national rather than the frontier or dynastic policies of which
the ‘nation in arms’ was the military instrument.
It would, of course, be wrong to imply that the impact of patriotism
upon warfare, and its practical application in the form of military
conscription, had been unknown, or at least not contemplated in pre-
Revolutionary years, de Sade had argued that conscription would
avoid the combination of force and fraud which produced nominally
volunteer forces by press-gang methods. The French military reformer,
Guibert, argued not only in favour of universal military service, but
also for military training methods based on national characteristics.
And Rousseau had claimed that only a national militia, in which every
citizen would serve as a soldier, would be adequate for the defence of
a free nation. But none of these had written hopefully. Guibert, in
particular, had foreseen that only political revolution could make
military revolution possible.
And even the Revolution, when it came, did not at first suggest that a
new type of army and new ways of fighting would develop out of it.
The cahiers de doleances of 1789 had, in many cases, called for the
abolition of provincial militias, with the implication that political
reform would make armed forces less and not more necessary. Then
followed a series of actions which broke up the old royal army without,
at any rate for the moment, putting any other effectively organised
military force in its place. The most serious element in this temporary
disorganisation was the loss of some two-thirds of the army’s officers.
Out of an establishment of nearly 10,000 officers in 1789 about 7000
were noblemen. Not all of these, let alone the officers who came from a
roturier background or were officers of fortune, were against the
Revolution. But many of them were, and quickly threw up their
commissions to join the emigres at Trier or Coblentz. The fall of the
Bastille, the formation of the National Guards, the fundamental decree
of the new military constitution of February 1790, which laid down that
every citizen was admissible to every military rank and employment, the
imposition of new oaths which subordinated traditional loyalty to the
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king to loyalty to the State and the constitution, all promoted the pro-
cess of disruption. Emigration of officers continued throughout 1791
and into 1792.
Already, in December 1789, Dubois-Crance had pleaded for universal
short service and a small regular army. He argued that citizenship and
the obligations of military service should go together. But the Con-
stituent Assembly decided to retain the system of voluntary enlistment
for pay. Theoretical objections to conscription, however, were of no
avail against the practical need for national armed forces, particularly
as the increasing violence of the Revolution appeared to be antagonising
the other monarchies of Europe. From June 1791, therefore, successive
and substantial increases of size took place in the French army. In that
summer it was decreed that 158 new battalions, over 100,000 men in all,
should be raised on a departmental basis by volunteers from the
National Guard. In May 1792 the Legislative Assembly called for
another 74,000 volunteers. This time, however, the voluntary principle
was limited in application. Each department and district was allotted
its quota and, if volunteers did not fill the list, then the rest were to be
forcibly enrolled by ballot. The same method was tried the following
spring. Many volunteers had terminated their engagements since the
end of 1792, and it was estimated that some 300,000 new recruits were
needed. It was highly unlikely that such a number would be forth-
coming from volunteers alone. And so the Convention agreed to the
requisition, by ballot among unmarried men between the ages of
eighteen and forty, of men to fill gaps not filled by volunteers. Com-
missioners were sent out into the provinces to urge on the recruiting
campaign.
Nevertheless it was clear that the voluntary system had completely
failed. The levee en masse, wholesale compulsory enlistment, was in
sight. On 23 August 1793 the Convention passed Carnot’s decree.
Five hundred and forty-three new battalions were to be raised by
conscription, were to be administered directly by the Minister of War
and to be distributed among eleven armies in the field.
All Frenchmen [it was announced] ... are called by their country to defend
liberty. . . . From this moment until that when the enemy is driven from the
territory of the republic, every Frenchman is commandeered for the needs of the
armies. Young men will go to the front; married men will forge arms, and carry
food; women will make tents and clothing, and work in hospitals; children will
turn old linen into bandages; old men will be carried into the squares to rouse the
courage of the combatants, to teach hatred of kings, and republican unity.
This was the proclamation of the modem nation in arms. Nor did its
appeal fail. Young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five,
the first class of requisitionnaires, provided over 400,000 conscripts and,
together with volunteers, satisfied the needs of the armies of the
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Republic for the next five years. By the spring of 1794 France had about
750,000 men under arms. Moreover, in the winter of 1793-4 there had
occurred the first amalgame, the merging of the remnants of the old
army with the new, a process which the earlier suspicious governments
of the Revolution had so strenuously resisted.
Napoleon continued, in principle, both the methods of recruitment
and those of promotion which had become established in the Republican
armies. At the same time the army of the Consulate and Empire
illustrates admirably the practical limits which prevented the full
application in this period of the principle of the ‘nation in arms’.
A law of the year VI (1798) rationalised the rules of recruitment already
in force, although those rules were not finally codified until 1811.
Military service was legally due from all Frenchmen between the ages
of twenty and twenty-five. But there were limits upon universality even
within these ages. First, the law itself expressly exempted many groups
from military service: married men; those, whether married or not,
with dependants; and later, priests. Next — and this for financial and
economic reasons — it was normal, until the last critical years of the
Empire, to call up only a proportion of those named on the fists.
Finally, it was possible for those chosen to find a substitute or replace-
ment, a privilege already established in practice and made legal in
May 1802.
Under the Directory, and at first with Napoleon, the size of the annual
contingent was approved by the Legislature, which also decided the
allocation among departments. Each municipality then provided for the
medical examination of those summoned, decided who were actually to
be called up and dealt with the business of replacements. Such an
arrangement was clearly open to abuses, with the possibility of bribery
and corruption at many stages. So Napoleon attempted to bring the
whole system more directly under central control. In 1 802 he ordered the
setting up, within each department, of a recruiting committee comprising
the prefect with some officers to help him , and their task was to examine
all cases of those who claimed exemption from military service. Three
years later local councils were deprived of all their responsibilities in
connection with recruitment, and their functions were taken over by
the prefect and sub-prefects. It was now the task of these officials to draw
up the list of those eligible for military service, to draw out strictly by lot
the names of those actually required, to arrange for the medical ex-
amination of recruits, and to dealwith the whole business of replacements.
Regimental officers were also present on these occasions, partly to
provide their professional advice if necessary, and then to deal with
the transfer of the selected recruits to their depots.
One revolutionary principle quite clearly infringed by this whole
process was that of equality. However fairly the original selection was
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made by lot, the subsequent privilege of providing a replacement worked
all too obviously in favour of the rich. In the Cote d’Or, for example,
during the middle years of the Empire the cost of a substitute varied
from about 2000 to 3500 francs, and only a very small percentage of the
total contingent could afford that price. Moreover, it seems doubtful
whether Napoleon’s attempts to control the earlier stages of enlistment
and examination proved entirely successful in eliminating corruption.
If, however, the principle of equality was denied in this particular
way, it was continuously observed by the Convention, by the Directory
and by Napoleon in one respect perhaps even more important. From the
beginning the armies of the Revolution had offered ambitious and
enthusiastic young men la carriere ouverte aux talents. Napoleon never
broke with that tradition. It really was possible to rise from the lowest
to the highest rank, and the biographies of Napoleon’s marshals amply
prove that. These were essentially fighting armies. And it was prowess
in battle rather than birth or intellectual qualities which led to pro-
motion. Honour was to be bought, but bought only by action in battle.
And although Napoleon dealt lavishly in ribbons and distinctions of all
kinds, and in the formation of corps d'elite within his armies, it was
fighting qualities which determined the choice between those who
succeeded and those who failed. Officers were thus much closer to their
men than in the armies of the ancien regime. The relationship was much
more like that which exists in some of the specialist arms of today where
a crew, whether in a tank or an aeroplane, tends to ignore distinctions of
rank. And the absence of distinction in the French armies of the
Revolution and Empire was made the more possible because these
armies developed no specialist general staff.
It would be wrong to suppose that man-power was recruited in this
period with the systematic thoroughness of the twentieth century.
Between 1800 and 1812 Napoleon enlisted little more than 1,100,000
Frenchmen; and even the crisis call-up of the years 1812 and 1813 took
well under 50 per cent of the men whose names appeared on the lists
of those eligible for military service. As Napoleon’s needs increased
so he used first foreign regiments and then the armies of allies and
vassals. But behind this facade of apparent moderation there were
excesses within the system which gradually changed military service
from an honourable obligation into a widespread hardship, and
especially as fighting became virtually continuous after 1805. For
example, in 1803 over 170,000 men of the classes of 1792 to 1799 were
retained with the colours and remained there more or less indefinitely.
Those who had never been called up, and those who had already found
substitutes for themselves, could never count on complete security;
for there was nothing to prevent such elements of an old class from
being called to the colours at a later date. This, for example, was done
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in 1805. Finally, in times of dire need the call up of a class could be
anticipated. For instance, the conscription class of 1815 had been
appelee en activite in October 1813 in a desperate attempt to offset the
losses suffered in Russia and in the Leipzig campaign. These youths
were legally too young for military service. Nevertheless, about
80,000 of them were training in the barracks during the final stages of
the war in 1814. It was evils such as these which eventually made con-
scription seem insufferable to many Frenchmen. So much so that
many of his strongest supporters tried to dissuade the emperor from
reintroducing conscription during the critical days of 1815.
Prussia was the most important country, outside France, where in
this period the process of social and political emancipation was accom-
panied by the military conscription of national man-power. In the
months after Tilsit Stein and his co-reformers agreed that the liberation
of Prussia demanded a national, a people’s army, and that such an
army could be created in Prussia only by the grant of basic social and
political privileges to all Prussian subjects. As in France, political
emancipation and military conscription were to be the twin pillars of
the nation in arms.
The reformers, it is true, were for a long time baulked both by the
suspicions of Frederick William III and by the restrictions imposed
by Napoleon. The king’s attitude was important because typical of
conservative thinking in many European countries throughout the
nineteenth century. Frederick William saw in a conscript army, or in a
militia, a threat to the efficiency of a professional force and also a
potential threat to royal authority. Napoleon, by the Treaty of Paris of
September 1808, imposed an overall limit of 42,000 men on the Prussian
army, and forbade the raising of a civil guard. It is clear now that
even the Kriimper system of replacements was organised on a very
limited basis and did not, in fact, produce a massive national liberation
army in 1813. On the other hand, much was done both to sow the
seeds of new ideas and to make possible the harvesting of a successful
crop in happier times. The new Ministry of War, under Scharnhorst’s
control from 1809, helped to break down that divorce between the army
and the nation which had contributed so much to the collapse of 1806.
Reforms in the recruitment and the training of the officer corps tended
in the same direction. And when the time of crisis arrived in 1813 the
idea of mobilising national man-power had been sufficiently debated
and planned to make it possible to act in a very short space of time.
First the East Prussian Landtag decided to mobilise a Landwehr of all
able-bodied men between the ages of 18 and 45. Then in February
1813 universal conscription was applied to Prussia as a whole. All men
between the ages of 17 and 40, if not already in the army or its volunteer
Jaeger detachments, were to be formed into a Landwehr on the East
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Prussian model or into forces for home defence and guerrilla operations.
Here was the same spirit as that which had inspired the levee en masse
in revolutionary France. By the end of 1813 Prussia had about six per
cent of the population, nearly 300,000 men, under arms, a force nearly
twice as large as the standing army of Frederick the Great.
One other military reform in this period emphasises the temporary
similarity between developments in France and in Prussia. After Jena
the Prussian reformers, particularly Schamhorst, were anxious to put
an end to the aristocratic monopoly of the officer corps. In Grolman’s
words — ‘In order to fight it is not necessary to belong to a special
class.’ A royal order of August 1808 declared that ‘a claim to the
position of officer shall from now on be warranted, in peace-time by
knowledge and education, in time of war by exceptional bravery and
quickness of perception. . . . All social preference which has hitherto
existed is herewith terminated in the mili tary establishment, and every-
one, without regard for his background, has the same duties and the
same rights. ’
The king and his close associates soon began to limit this freedom,
even before 1815, and more decisively afterwards. But some of the
institutional reforms which accompanied it, for example the establish-
ment of new military academies for the selection and training of
officers, left a permanent mark upon the Prussians. The value of in-
tellectual qualities in an officer was formally recognised, even if the old
social requirements still, in large part, remained.
The most obvious sign, then, of the introduction of the period of
people’s wars — what we in the twentieth century have come to call total
war — was a vast increase in the number of men under arms and of the
size of armies in the field. The generals of the eighteenth century,
from Marlborough onwards, had fought their battles with armies of
50.000 to 75,000 men. Indeed, Frederick the Great’s battlefield numbers
were little over 40,000 at Leuthen and Kunersdorf, and lower at
Mollwitz. Napoleon appears to have had about 35,000 men at the
start of his brilliant campaign against the Austrian and Piedmontese
forces in 1796. For Marengo his numbers were up to 50,000. But for
Ulm in 1805 and for Jena in 1806 Napoleon manoeuvred armies
totalling some 180,000 to 190,000 men on each occasion, while the
forces assembled for the invasion of Russia in 1812 rose to three times
that number. Nor did Napoleon’s enemies fail to conform to this general
pattern of development. True, when fighting alone no one of them could
match him . But the Austrians assembled some 85,000 men for the Ulm
campaign and even more for Wagram. In 1806 Prussia put nearly
150.000 men into the field for the fighting which culminated at Jena.
And in 1815 Russia, Prussia, Austria and England agreed to produce
a total of nearly 600,000 to march by converging routes on Paris.
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When the fighting at Ligny and Waterloo took place in June of that year
nearly 250,000 troops, French, British and Prussian, were massed
together for the final decision. Thus was the age of the ‘armed horde’
ushered in.
If war, looked at from the point of view of man-power, had changed
its character, this was far from true of the weapons those men used.
The weapons of this period were those which had been slowly developed
during the eighteenth century and which remained in use until the
second half of the nineteenth. While the political Revolution had
released moral forces of incalculable significance, the early Industrial
Revolution — despite all it did to enable Britain to wage war for over
twenty years — did nothing comparable for the material and technical
aspects of war.
The musket was the basic infantry weapon. It was the smooth-bored,
muzzle-loaded flintlock which had come into general use early in the
eighteenth century and which was to remain the standard infantry
weapon for another generation after Waterloo. The advantages of
grooved or rifled barrels had been known since the sixteenth century.
There had been riflemen in the British Army as early as the war of
American Independence. But rifling was expensive and was not easily
combined with muzzle loading. The flintlock musket therefore remained
in general use throughout this period, and was normally fitted with a
bayonet. The infantry was thus provided with the modern combination
of missile and shock weapon in one.
The musket or fusil of any European pattern was not a particularly
efficient weapon. Flints wore out, barrels became fouled by the burn-
ing of coarse powder, and the powder itself was difficult to keep dry in
wet weather. The complicated process of loading and priming meant
that even highly trained and disciplined soldiers could not achieve a
much higher rate of fire than about a round a minute, or two rounds a
minute at the most. The ball so discharged was not normally effective
beyond about 200 yards and then only when fired at a large target. At
that distance, for example, the French musket was subject to an error of
about 9 feet. Infantry therefore usually held their fire until the target
was much closer.
All the technical limitations which prevented the development of a
really effective hand weapon in this period also barred the way to the
production of accurate artillery. The science of ballistics had already
been well developed in the seventeenth century. It was the practice not
the theory of gun-fire which lagged behind. So long as guns were
smooth-bored, muzzle-loaded and clumsily fired by coarse powder
mixtures, neither speedy nor accurate fire was really possible. Guns,
like muskets, were fired once, perhaps as much as twice a minute with a
skilled crew. Since there was no way of absorbing recoil action, pieces
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had to be re-laid after each round. And although a 1 2-pounder could
achieve an extreme range of about 3500 yards, its effective range was
half that or less, and a much closer range was normally used.
Military reformers since the time of Gustavus Adolphus had attempted
to improve their field artillery both by standardising types of guns and
by making them more mobile, particularly on the actual field of battle.
The French reformer Gribeauval, who became inspector-general at the
end of the Seven Years’ War, had done much in this direction in the
mid-eighteenth century. He made guns lighter by shortening their barrels
and he also made improvements in the process of boring, reducing the
windage and thus improving accuracy. He reduced the calibres of field
guns to three — 4-, 8- and 12-pounders, and he also favoured the use of
horse artillery. Moreover, his practical reforms were the basis of a
well-known book published in 1778, Sur V usage de Vartillerie nouvelle
dans la guerre de campagne written by the Chevalier du Teil, an artillery
officer in the regiment in which Napoleon was to be a subaltern.
In artillery almost more than in any other arm we can see the slow
but continuous development in French military thought and practice
throughout the last years of the old regime and into those of the
Revolution and Empire. 1 For all his genius Napoleon was no more of a
tactical innovator in artillery than in other arms. There was in general,
during these years and virtually independent of Napoleon’s own career,
a development of artillery along three lines. First, a gradual organisa-
tion of artillery into separate regiments instead of being distributed in
‘penny packets’ among infantry and cavalry. Despite some changes
made by Napoleon, in Egypt and later in Russia, the division re-
mained the smallest unit to which artillery was normally attached during
this period. Second, an increasing use of horse artillery, as evidenced
by a law on the subject passed by the Legislative Assembly in April
1792. Third, a concentration of fire power on the battlefield, so that
artillery ceased to have merely a nuisance value in hampering the enemy
as he assembled on the battlefield and became, instead, a weapon with
which to blast holes in his ranks before launching an infantry or cavalry
attack to complete the process of disruption. Du Teil, whom Napoleon
almost certainly read, had written:
In reconnoitring positions for the batteries the first objective should be the enemy’s
troops, not his artillery. No notice must be taken of his artillery except when his fire
greatly disturbs the troops which we are protecting. It follows as a principle that
we ought never to engage in artillery duels, except when it is indispensable for the
protection of our troops, but that on the contrary our principal purpose must be, as
has been said, to fire on the enemy’s troops, when we can destroy them or the
obstacles which cover them.
1 For this development, see Matti Lauerma, L'Artillerie de Campagne frangaise pendant
les guerres de la Revolution (Helsinki, 1956).
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The relative strength and importance of artillery tended to increase
throughout the wars of the First Empire. To some extent this was a
compensation for the deteriorating quality of man-power, to some
extent perhaps a sign of Napoleon’s own waning genius as brute force
slowly overtook subtlety. During the campaigns of 1805 and 1806 the
Grand Army had two artillery pieces for 1000 men. This figure was
slightly increased for the 1809 campaign. By 1812 the figure had risen to
3^ pieces per 1000 men and, at some stages in that campaign, to an even
higher figure. In 1796 Marmont broke the enemy’s front at Castiglione
with 19 cannons; at Wagram in 1809 and at Moscow in 1812 more than
100 pieces were assembled for a similar task. At Waterloo Napoleon
began the action with a similar concentration.
Since Waterloo has been mentioned it is also interesting to note that
at that battle the horse artillery of the British proved itself superior to
the French, from whom this particular lesson in mobility had originally
been learned. Indeed, a committee of enquiry set up by the French
Ministry of War in 1818 reported that by their improvement in the
organisation of horse artillery ‘ . . . the English have made the Field
Batteries a new arm’.
Apart from their vital functions of reconnaissance, providing cover
whether in advance or retreat, and dealing with small independent
operations at a distance from the main body of an army, cavalry had
always had an important function on the battlefield itself. Ideas about
the nature of that function and the weapons proper to it had varied a
good deal since the introduction of fire-arms. At various periods cavalry
had been equipped with fire-arms, often a short carbine, which generally
proved of little fighting value to them. At other times commanders
such as Gustavus Adolphus, Cromwell and Marlborough had insisted
that the battlefield value of cavalry was as a shock weapon with cold
steel, the sword. Certainly cavalry had a most important function in
protecting the flanks of the otherwise vulnerable infantry line. Their
value in attack against an unbroken line of infantry was much more
questionable.
The early years of the Revolution found the French army extremely
weak in cavalry. Many emigres had been in cavalry regiments, and
sometimes whole regiments went over to the enemy. This was too
specialised an arm to build up again quickly. Moreover, the gradual
development of the division, a small unit of all arms capable of fighting
independently, led to an increasing tendency to use cavalry in smaller
units than hitherto, and in a more intimate and at the same time more
flexible relationship with the infantry. There was also a clear tendency
to look upon the sabre and not fire-arms as the proper cavalry weapon.
Napoleon made several important changes. First he reduced the
number of heavy cavalry regiments by about a half, from 25 to 14.
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But those he kept were made into genuine heavy cavalry, with breast-
plate and back-plate. These were never dispersed as divisional cavalry,
but were kept as a reserve for shock battle service, and were organised
and fought in homogeneous brigades and divisions. It was cuirassiers
in massed formation who, under Ney’s command, charged Wellington’s
squares in the afternoon of Waterloo.
Secondly, Napoleon greatly increased his regiments of medium and
light horse, gradually converting dragoons from mounted infantry
into cavalry proper, and making them much more like his chasseurs
and hussars. This conversion of dragoons from a separate arm into
regular cavalry was a process going on throughout Europe during this
period. Napoleon used most of his light cavalry, chasseurs and hussars,
to provide army corps cavalry, a corps having between two and four
cavalry regiments attached to it. The remainder of the light cavalry
were brigaded and, together with the dragoons, formed the cavalry
reserve. Such a reserve, if not needed for shock action in battle, was
then available for the sort of pursuit which could sometimes turn an
indecisive battle into a rout. In both the Ulm and the Jena campaigns
a decisive cavalry pursuit of this kind occurred.
Infantry were the principal arm of all military forces in this period, as
indeed they had normally been since the days of sixteenth-century pike-
men. It was easier to equip and to instruct large numbers of infantry
rather than cavalry or artillery, and the part played by infantry in the
development of tactics in this period was, in general, decisive.
By the time of the War of the Spanish Succession and for a good deal
of the eighteenth century the accepted method of engaging infantry in
battle was in line form. The infantry part of the line consisted of two or
three ranks of musketeers, sometimes firing simultaneously, sometimes
independently, sometimes firing as a complete line, sometimes in com-
panies or even platoons. Because, as has already been pointed out, the
musket was comparatively inefficient, the whole object of infantry
fire was to achieve fire by volleys and that as continuous as possible.
In addition, even volley fire was comparatively harmless unless dealt
at fairly close range. All this meant an infantry the inefficiency of whose
weapons was compensated for by a high degree of formation discipline
which, in its turn, was the product of long training.
For some time before the Revolution, certainly in France, there had
been much discussion about the best way to deploy infantry in battle, for
the fine was by no means accepted by all military writers as the right
solution. One of its most serious disadvantages was that the drawing up
of a line on the battlefield took valuable time, often hours, and troops
were normally in no position to fight effectively while this was going on.
Guibert, for example, had held that while the infantry fine was the best
tactical deployment for controlled fire-power and for defensive purposes,
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the massed column was sometimes more effective offensively, parti-
cularly for fighting over broken ground. Further, Guibert argued that
infantry in battalion columns could deploy more easily on the field of
battle, before forming into line, and move more quickly from one part
of the battlefield to another, while fighting was in progress.
In the tactics of thirty years ago, [he wrote] and of some armies today, the movements
for forming a line of battle were so slow and complicated that they took hours.
The line had to be formed at a safe distance from the enemy, and once the formation
had been taken up it was dangerous to attempt to change it. But with my system it
will be safe to take the formation of battle as late and as near to the enemy as
possible, and also to change that order after it has been taken, in other words to
make counter-manoeuvres . 1
The advocates of line and column fought out their verbal battle in
France during the last twenty years before the Revolution. The result,
embodied in a new infantry drill manual of 1791, was a compromise
roughly as Guibert had advocated. This manual, which remained
in use until 1831, showed some preference for the line in many condi-
tions; but the usual way of forming the line was to be from close
column by deployment, and it was admitted that the column had certain
advantages in attack. In other words, commanders were given discretion
to use the line or the column as they thought best.
One other related matter had also been the subject of much debate dur-
ing the same period — the advantages and disadvantages of skirmishers
operating in front of the main line. The nuisance value of elusive
skirmishers against the disciplined line was well known in the eighteenth
century, and was certainly employed by the Austrian army. The
Austrians had used Croat bands for this purpose, and Marshal Saxe,
learning from that example, had added light skirmishing troops to his
own army. The British had used Rangers, corps of riflemen, in a com-
parable capacity against the backwoods marksmen during the War of
American Independence. And although the Rangers had been dis-
banded after 1783, light infantry or rifle corps were in existence again
in the British Army by 1800. Indeed, here lay the origin of the famous
Rifle Brigade. These light infantry were organised in picked battalions,
armed with a light-weight musket, and were specially instructed in
skirmishing work. In their drill manual of 1791 the French made no
mention of this particular matter. But modem French authorities
claim that this was less from any official opposition to the practice than
from a wish, again, to leave commanders free to act according to their
own discretion.
What had been very largely subjects for discussion before 1789
became of very great practical importance from 1792. There was no
sudden break with tradition when revolutionary France first went to
1 Comte J. A. H. de Guibert, Essai general de Tactique (London, 1772), vol. 1, p. 183.
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war against the monarchies of Europe. French generals in 1792 and
1793 tended to hold to the line formation, since the veterans in their
armies had been trained in this way and the new recruits at first fitted
into the old system. This is what happened at Valmy. The massed
column for attack was tried out once or twice, for example at Jemappes,
but not with very satisfactory results. By 1794, however, and par-
ticularly in the Armee du Nord where the necessarily large reinforce-
ments of new levies greatly lowered the discipline — though not the spirit
— of the French troops, fighting in line became practically impossible.
As a result, the French infantry in large numbers fought dispersed as
skirmishers, using cover for their harassing fire and withdrawing when
counter-attacked. This is what happened at Hondeschoote. Wall-
moden’s Hanoverians fought for four hours against a swarm of French
skirmishers. The latter withdrew to the cover of trees, hedges and
buildings when attacked, and gradually crumpled the line in front of
them by shooting it to pieces.
This loose formation was the natural response of courageous but
ill-trained enthusiasts. But the French levies were rapidly gaining
experience all the time and effective skirmishing was, in fact, as much a
job for a skilled soldier as fighting in line. The next step came when
skirmishers, trained specifically for the job, prepared the way for a
demoralising attack by infantry in column. This happened, for example,
at the battle of Sprimont in September 1794, when the assaulting
column went in with the bayonet. These columns which came in behind
the skirmishers were formed either of companies or of divisions, i.e. with
a depth of either twenty-four or twelve men. In either case only the
first two ranks could use their firearms; the rest performed their task
by sheer mass, but very effectively against a thin line which had already
been disorganised and depleted by skirmishing fire.
By 1795-6 the French armies had really perfected fighting in ordre
mixte. This was a combination of skirmishers, fine and column —
supported of course by artillery and cavalry. In this fashion a number
of different tactical combinations could be used for a variety of condi-
tions of terrain and opposition. But, basically, skirmishers harassed
the enemy line; battalions still in line contained the enemy and pre-
vented him from achieving a decisive concentration, and the column
broke through at the chosen point.
Whether it was morale engendered by revolutionary fervour or, in
fact, superior tactics, French armies with their skirmishers and massed
columns did sweep across Europe. The column proved itself master of
the line in many an engagement. Nonetheless, the new tactics were still
vulnerable to the old, given trained troops in the fine, or ordre mince,
and a general in command who was willing to adapt the use of the fine to
the new conditions. This is what happened with Wellington, both in the
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Peninsular War and at Waterloo. The column was dangerously defence-
less against an unbroken line of musketeers. Trained fire-power was, as
always, bound to prove superior to sheer elan. The essence of the
problem can perhaps best be stated by two quotations. The first is
from an anonymous English pamphlet published in 1802.
The French Army was composed of troops of the line without order, and of raw
and inexperienced volunteers. They experienced defeats in the beginning, but war
in the meantime was forming both officers and soldiers. In an open country they
took to forming their armies in columns instead of fines, which they could not
preserve without difficulty. They reduced battles to attacks on certain points, where
brigade succeeded brigade, and fresh troops supplied the place of those who were
driven back, till they were enabled to force the post, and make the enemy give way.
They were fully aware that they could not give battle in regular order, and sought to
reduce engagements to important affairs of posts. This plan has succeeded. They
look upon losses as nothing, provided they succeed in the end; they set little value
on their men, because they have the certainty of being able to replace them, and the
customary superiority of their numbers affords them an advantage which can only
be counterbalanced by great skill, conduct, and activity.
The second quotation, and with it the opposite side of the picture, is
from Bugeaud’s well known account after 1815.
The English generally occupied well-chosen defensive positions, having a certain
command, and they showed only a portion of their force. The usual artillery action
first took place. Soon, in great haste, without studying the position, without taking
time to examine if there were means to make a flank attack, we marched straight on,
taking the bull by the horns. About a thousand yards from the English line the
men became excited, spoke to one another and hurried their march; the column
began to be a little confused. The English remained quite silent with ordered arms,
and from their steadiness appeared to be a long red walL This steadiness invariably
produced an effect on the young soldiers. Very soon we got nearer, shouting
‘ Vive I'Empereur! en avant! a la baionnette!' Shakos were raised on the muzzles of
the muskets; the column began to double, the ranks got into confusion, the agitation
produced a tumult; shots were fired as we advanced. The English line remained
still, silent and immovable, with ordered arms, even when we were only three
hundred paces distant, and it appeared to ignore the storm about to break. The
contrast was striking; in our inmost thoughts, each felt that the enemy was a long
time in firing, and that this fire, reserved for so long, would be very unpleasant when
it did come. Our ardour cooled. The moral power of steadiness, which nothing
shakes (even if it be only in appearance), over disorder which stupefies itself with
noise, overcame our minds. At this moment of intense excitement, the English wall
shouldered arms; an indescribable feeling rooted many of our men to the spot; they
began to fire. The enemy’s steady concentrated volleys swept our ranks; decimated,
we turned round seeking to recover our equilibrium; then three deafening cheers
broke the silence of our opponents; at the third they were on us, pushing our dis-
organised flight. 1
But the superficial tale of British successes should not be accepted
without some qualifications. In the first place, Napoleon realised that
1 Cited by Spencer Wilkinson, The French Army before Napoleon (Oxford, 1915), p. 58.
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the column succeeded only when the ground had been carefully pre-
pared for it. ‘Even in the open,’ he once said, ‘columns do not
penetrate lines unless they are supported by overwhelming artillery fire
preparing the attack.’ And Wellington, despite his confidence in the
line, knew that it needed protection. A study of his campaigns against
the French shows that, within the limits of the possibilities open to
him, he always protected his line of musketeers first by some natural
cover, second by a forward screen of skirmishers and, lastly, by flank
cover from artillery or cavalry.
There is one other respect in which the armies of this period broke
with the tradition of the previous one hundred years. The lack of
mobility in most eighteenth-century armies is to some extent explained
by the fact that they normally depended for their supplies upon pre-
pared magazines. Whether this was part of a general reaction against
the brutality and devastation of the Thirty Years’ War, or whether it
was part and parcel of that original sin of caution which besets so many
soldiers, it is impossible to say. The fact is that magazines determined
lines of communication and therefore the scope of operations.
Guibert, in this as in so much else, foresaw the advantages in mobility
and surprise which could be gained by breaking with tradition and thus
gaining the chances of decisive action if an army could move along lines
of its own choosing without being hampered by the provision of its own
supplies.
It is astonishing how much a good military administration can extract from the
resources of a country. I speak of a populous and fertile country such as Flanders
and the greater part of Germany. I am not exclusive nor excessive in my opinions.
I will not say to an army; ‘Have no supply trains, no magazines, no transport;
always live on the country; advance if need be into the deserts of the Ukraine;
Providence will feed you.’ I want an army to have provision wagons, but as few as
possible, proportionate to its force, to the nature of the country in which it is to
operate, and to the means required in ordinary operations. If it starts from a river
or a frontier, let it have on this base magazines and depots well situated with a view
to their defence and to the plan of operations. But if it is necessary to undertake a
bold operation and forced marches the army must be able to discard the precise
methods of routine. The enemy, I will assume, takes an unexpected position in
which I cannot and will not attack him; I am sure to dislodge him or to take him in
rear if I march towards his flank. According to our actual routine I shall require
for this change of direction to form new depots and new rayons of communication.
I shall be asked for fifteen days to form these new magazines. What I want to avoid
is that my supplies should command me. It is in this case my movement that is the
main thing; all the other combinations are accessory and I must try to make them
subordinate to the movement. The enemy must see me marching when he supposes
me fettered by the calculation of my supplies; this new kind of war must astonish
him, must nowhere leave him time to breathe, and make him see at his own expense
this constant truth that hardly any position is tenable before an army well con-
stituted, sober, patient, and able to manoeuvre. The moment of crisis past, my
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movement having fulfilled its purpose, then the supplies can return to the usual
system of order and precision. 1
The armies of the French Republic developed the system of requisi-
tions as much by the necessity enforced upon them by administrative
chaos at home as by any theory of war. And the tone was set by
Bonaparte when he took over the ragged and half-starved Army of
Italy in March 1796, and promised them that their reward lay in the
conquest of Milan and the rich plain of Lombardy. Clearly this was a
method of subsistence for victorious armies, and provided they fought
in fertile and populous areas. Poland and Russia in 1812 showed the
reverse side of the coin. And, as Clausewitz later pointed out, individual
scavenging was no way for an army to support itself. If ‘living off the
land’ was to be worthwhile, then it must be done by ordered requisitions
through the normal machinery of local administration.
This survey would be incomplete without some attempt to assess
the place of Napoleon, as a general, in the developments which have
been previously outlined. The first point to be made clear is that
Napoleon was not a great military reformer. In this respect he is not
fit to rank with Gustavus Adolphus or Frederick the Great. He made
no important contribution to the development of weapons or of tactics.
Even in his own professional arm, artillery, it was not until the battles of
his middle and later years that he produced the massed artillery barrage;
and, even then, his use of guns does not show a steady evolution towards
a new tactical concept. In all arms the types of weapon used, and the
tactical views about their employment, owed more to the reformers of
Louis XVI’s reign and to the practice of the early revolutionary armies
than to Napoleon himself. And the same generalisation applies to the
development of the large armies of ‘the nation in arms’. At St Helena
Napoleon is reported to have said — ‘I have fought sixty battles, and I
have learned nothing which I did not know in the beginning.’ It was
an entirely accurate comment on at least one aspect of his generalship.
What, then, was Napoleon’s distinguishing mark as a ‘great captain’ ?
It was his ability to move very large armies, sometimes of 200,000 men
and more, across great stretches of the continent at speeds far greater
than had hitherto been thought possible; to manoeuvre these armies
into positions best calculated to meet his enemies separately or break
them apart if they had met; and to produce, on his side, a decisive
superiority of force at the critical moment. Napoleon developed to their
peak the fervour and military unorthodoxy of the Revolution. The
‘blitzkrieg’ was as truly a feature of Ulm, Austerlitz and Jena as it was
of the first Italian campaign; and those later battles reveal the same
ability to break his enemies apart before fighting them separately.
Indeed, the Waterloo campaign, for all its ultimate failure, began on the
1 Guibert, op. cit. vol. n, p. 58.
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same high note and with the same recipe for success. The campaign in
Russia failed partly because the area over which Napoleon operated
from the start was too large for the necessary degree of personal control
to be effective; partly because the roads and state of agriculture were
too far below western European standards to make the necessary swift
movement and living off the land possible; and partly because the
Russians could withdraw, and chose to do so, rather than stand and
fight.
This entirely personal quality of generalship, the art of the com-
mander to detect the weak point in the enemy’s deployment and to
strike there with a swift and overwhelming concentration of force, had
one further result. Napoleon planned and conducted his own cam-
paigns. He felt that he could not trust even his most experienced
marshals to understand his strategy unless he dictated all its details.
He therefore developed no permanent staff organisation and bequeathed
no staff tradition. The Prussian reformers of his own time, whatever
their defects, knew better. They had seen the harm caused by purely
personal leadership and now sought to perpetuate the lessons of
experience in a permanent organisation. In that, as much as anything
else, lay the secret of the greater success of Prussian arms in the
nineteenth century.
B. NAVIES
The period of warfare when it was possible for Gibbon to speak of
forces as being employed in ‘temperate and undecisive contests’ came
to an end in the era of Nelson and Napoleon. Wars in which decisive
victories were won were now fought on an unprecedented scale. Nelson,
who embodied the art of the admiral, and Napoleon who embodied that
of the general, agreed on the fundamental tactical principle of the
concentration of force because under prevailing conditions, as Nelson
said, ‘Only numbers can annihilate’. Moreover the tactical freedom
which he enjoyed now that the old Fighting Instructions had been
replaced by the new signal books (notably Sir Home Popham’s Marine
Vocabulary) enabled him to improvise brilliantly as he did at the battle
of the Nile, or plan with minute care an unusual mode of attack, as at
Copenhagen and Trafalgar. His successes were made possible by the
high number of officers of unusual ability in the British navy at that
date. The fleets which he led to victory had been trained by Lord
St Vincent, and his ‘band of brothers’ had already seen service in the
War of American Independence. A new spirit of leadership atoned for
whatever shortcomings there were in the administrative machine,
whereas the efficiency of his enemies was impaired by their lack of
combat experience and the consequences of earlier revolutionary
excesses.
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If sea power under sail may be said to depend on the three factors of
an efficient battle fleet, a flourishing merchant marine, and overseas
bases from which attacks on colonial possessions could be launched,
Britain was in a favourable position at the start of the war. Nevertheless
the traditional strategy adopted by Dundas (who was responsible for the
general direction of the war) was increasingly criticised by naval authori-
ties because of its dissipation of resources. As regards the policy of
colonial conquest, good dividends were paid by the acquisition of such
places as the Cape of Good Hope in 1795 and Ceylon the next year;
but after eight years of war no foothold had been secured on the
continent of Europe, from which British landings were ignominiously
expelled on several occasions. Not until the latter part of the war
were amphibious tactics perfected, first in Egypt and southern Italy,
and then in Spain. The offensive uses of sea power, which lay in the
ability to land and maintain an army at any spot on the long periphery
of the enemy’s defences, were then successfully demonstrated. ‘If any-
one wishes to know the history of this war,’ Wellington told a naval
officer, ‘I will tell them that it is our maritime superiority gives me the
power of maintaining my army, while the enemy are unable to do so.’ 1
As Napoleon’s power spread over the whole continent, a greater
concentration was required for the blockade of the enemy’s fleets and
the destruction of his commerce. The strategy of blockade had evolved
over the past century, but its tactics continued to vary between the
‘open’ or distant blockade of Howe and Nelson, and the ‘close’
blockade favoured by St Vincent, Cornwallis and Collingwood. The
success of the former policy was jeopardised by the risks of French fleets
escaping (as indeed they did) when the British were off station. The
‘close’ blockade of Brest, Rochefort, Cadiz and Toulon decided the
issue of the war; but it was a slow means of victory which required
enormous powers of endurance on the part of the ships and men engaged
in it, as well as expensive logistical support in the form of reserve ships
to replace and replenish those on station. Nevertheless, as Mahan said,
it was indeed ‘these far distant, storm-beaten ships, upon which the
Grand Army never looked, which stood between it and the dominion
of the world.’ 2
The supreme test of this strategy, whether carried out by line-of-
battle ships or by cruising frigates, came with Napoleon’s Continental
System after the battle of Trafalgar had eliminated any chance of a
successful invasion of Britain. It was argued that, if Britain could be
exhausted by the strain of maintaining a blockade of almost the whole
1 Letters of Sir T. Byam Martin , ed. Sir R. V. Hamilton (Navy Records Society, 1898),
vol. n, p. 409. Cf. Keith Papers, ed. C. Lloyd (Navy Records Society, 1955), vol. in,
pp. 259 ff.
s A. T. Mahan, Influence of Sea Power in the War of the French Revolution (London, 1 893),
vol. n, p. 1 1 8.
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coastline of Europe, while at the same time her overseas trade was
denied her, national bankruptcy would ensue. But by the extension of
the credit system, by developing new patterns of trade and organised
smuggling from such bases as Heligoland, the ‘real’ value of British
exports actually increased from £11 million in 1805 to £43 million in
1811. 1
Privateering was the more traditional form of commerce destruction
adopted by the French. This was countered by the Act of 1798 which
made convoy compulsory for all ships except licensed ‘runners’, for
which higher insurance premiums were paid. Only one or two frigates
accompanied the huge convoys which sailed from the West Indies or
the Baltic, but support squadrons were provided in dangerous areas and
by the end of the war the risk of capture in convoy was negligible.
Privateers continued to haunt the Channel, causing the underwriters of
Lloyd’s to put pressure on the Admiralty for better protection, but this
form of warfare had evidently ceased to pay; on the other hand, there
was almost a complete cessation of imports from overseas into con-
tinental Europe owing to the activities of British warships. 2
France declared war on Britain in February 1793, without a navy
worthy of the name. In order to fight an enemy possessing some 400
warships, of which 115 were of the line, she could muster only 246, of
which 76 were of the line and of these only 27 were in commission.
These ships were a legacy of the navy of the ancien regime, but such was
the hostility felt towards the officer class by the Jacobins that very few
of the grand corps remained in service. The ports were in a state of
chaos. The ordinance of 1791 had removed all distinction between the
merchant and the professional navies; the corps of marines had been
disbanded, and all the bonds of discipline loosened in compliance with
the egalitarianism of the day. On his first short cruise from Brest,
Morard de Galle complained that he could never persuade more than
fifty men to be on deck at a given time. 3
The most violent critic of the old navy was Jeanbon Saint-Andre, a
demagogue who had but slight acquaintance with the sea. Since he was
possessed by a fanatical hatred of the ‘insolent pride’ of such an
aristocratic profession, it was to him that the Committee turned in
September 1793 to organise a republican navy. It was too late to save
the Toulon fleet, of which 42 ships of all classes were burned or captured
1 E. F. Hecksher, The Continental System (Oxford, 1922), pp. 42, 166, 245.
8 Of 327 accounts studied for the war period, 200 show no profit; between 1803 and
1813, 156 St Malo privateers took only 170 prizes. L. Vignols in Revue d’Histoire £conomique
(1927), and H. Malo, Les Dernieres corsaires (Paris, 1925). But the evidence of Lloyd's
List suggests that British losses were heavy in the early part of the war — 3466 vessels in
seven years; many of these were retaken.
8 E. Chevalier, Histoire de la Marine Frangaise sous !a Premiire Republique (Paris, 1886),
p. 51. W. James, Naval History of Great Britain (London, 1837), gives comparative statistics
of the two navies in vol. 1.
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by Hood before the English evacuated the port in December; but at
Brest, Jeanbon, though he was no Carnot, succeeded by his energy
in creating a new fleet. The incompetent Morard was replaced by
Villaret de Joyeuse, a lieutenant in 1791 and an admiral of the fleet in
1794. Other members of the old navy, though all of bourgeois birth,
whose rise to flag rank was equally rapid, were Van Stabel, Nielly and
Ganteaume, while Sane, the great naval architect, continued to build
ships for the new navy as he had for the old. The fanatical courage with
which Villaret’s fleet fought at the Glorious First of June in 1794 is a
tribute to Jeanbon’s work, but the experience taught him that revolu-
tionary ardour without training or discipline was not enough. A
marine artillery corps of 25,000 men was re-formed, officers ceased to
be elected by their men, and the inscription maritime was revised so that
88.000 seamen became liable for service. To symbolise the new spirit,
the tricolor replaced the white flag of the Bourbons in February 1794. 1
The tendency towards the centralisation of naval administration,
which the Convention began because of its distrust of the loyalty of the
ports, continued under the Directory. Steps were taken to re-establish a
professional marine militaire de la republique of 1300 officers and
60.000 men. More officers of the old navy were re-employed, such as
Brueys, Villeneuve and Deeres. Similarly, under the Napoleonic
regime, a military flavour was imparted to the fleet. Sailors were
organised into battalions and a hierarchy of admirals, capitaines de
vaisseaux, capitaines de fregates, lieutenants and ensigns was estab-
lished on a broader basis of entry than of old; training ships for boys,
who passed out as aspirants, were opened in 1810. Drill, whether on
shore or on board ships in harbour, was intensive, but it never com-
pensated for the lack of experience at sea or in action. The French navy,
in fact, never experienced that revolution in the art of war which we
associate with Nelson or Napoleon.
An unenterprising strategic attitude marks the whole period of
Deeres’ Ministry of Marine from 1801 to 1814. Apart from the Egyptian
expedition and the fleet movements of 1805, the occasional cruises
which escaped the blockading forces were futile because the com-
manders were anxious to avoid battle. Deeres did his best to restrain
any offensive use of the fleet by the emperor, so that the latter was
justified in complaining that he could not find an admiral who was
willing to risk the loss of a few ships in order to gain a victory. The
strategic doctrine was that of a ‘fleet in being’; in the minister’s view,
the strength of the British navy could be worn down, provided sufficient
ships were built in all the main ports of France and her allies. Hence the
big building programme after the main fighting force had been destroyed
1 Cf. L. L6vy-Schneider, Le Conventionnel Jeanbon Saint-Andre (Paris, 1901), and N.
Hampson, La Marine de l’ An II (Paris, 1959).
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at Trafalgar. No less than 83 of the line and 65 frigates were built, so
that in 1814 the fleet consisted of 103 of the line and 157 frigates, in
spite of the heavy losses suffered during the war. These losses amounted
to 377 ships captured or destroyed in action, 24 by shipwreck. The
equivalent British figures — 10 and 101 — are sufficient commentary
upon the nature of the war at sea. 1
Another strategic policy which Napoleon inherited from his pre-
decessors was the invasion of Britain. The Jacobins had begun the war
with the intention of planting 50,000 caps of liberty on British soil.
Hoche came nearest to this ideal in 1796 when an invasion force reached
Bantry Bay in the depth of winter, but so bad was the weather that not a
man could be landed. The various schemes with which Napoleon
amused himself cannot be described here ; suffice it to say that by August
1805 there were 2343 boats capable of transporting 167,590 men from
the Channel ports, and the grand diversionary plans for the use of the
combined fleets of France and Spain looked like maturing; but the
number of men ready for immediate embarkation was less than
100,000. So successfully were the emperor’s schemes forestalled that
even before Trafalgar he began to switch his strategy to one of land
conquest, disclaiming that he ever had any intention to invade. 2
Except for a brief period in 1827, when the title of Lord High Admiral
was revived for the Duke of Clarence, the administration of the British
navy was in the hands of the Board of Admiralty and the Navy Board,
until the latter (together with subsidiary boards such as those for
victualling, transport, sick and wounded etc.) were all abolished in 1832.
The relation between the military or executive functions of the Admiralty
and the civilian or supply services of the Navy Board were happiest
when Sir Charles Middleton was comptroller of the latter board
(1778-90) and when as Lord Barham he was first lord in 1805-6.
He considered the system of dyarchy unsatisfactory because, as the
office of comptroller — ‘the mainspring belonging to everything that is
naval’ — was second only in importance to that of the first lord, he
should therefore have a seat on the Board of Admiralty. When his
recommendations for reform were rejected he resigned, though he
continued for some time to act in an advisory capacity. 3
Relations were worst when St Vincent was first lord between 1801
and 1804. As an executive officer he had long been convinced that
‘the civil branch of the navy is rotten to the core’. As soon as peace
was signed he turned his formidable energies to a personal investiga-
tion of the dockyards, against the wishes of the Navy Board. He found
1 Michael Lewis, A Social History of the Navy , 1793-1815 (London, i960), p. 348.
1 E. Desbriere, Projets et Tentatives de debarquement aux lies Britanniques, 1793-1805
(Paris, 1902), vol. rv, pp. 464-6.
8 Barham Papers, ed. Sir J. K. Laughton (Navy Records Society, 1910), vol. m, p. 33.
Cf. Sir O. Murray in Mariner's Mirror, 1938.
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the situation worse than he imagined. ‘Portsmouth was bad enough,
but Chatham beggars all description.’ As a notorious disciplinarian, it
was easy for him to break a strike of shipwrights under John Gast,
one of the early trade unionists; but when the Addington cabinet
‘mutinied’ (as he put it) at the prospect of taking action against such a
powerful body as the timber trust, he forced them to set up a com-
mission of enquiry by the threat of resignation. In 1804, however, what
his fellow Whig, Fox, called ‘an insurrection of jobbers’ found a
mouthpiece in Pitt, whose attack on the alleged inefficient state of the
navy resulted in the fall of the government. St Vincent had certainly
restricted the building of small craft and had not made full use of the
merchants’ yards, because he mistakenly thought that the peace would
last; but when the reports of the Commissions of Naval Enquiry
appeared in subsequent years, his allegations of plunder and peculation
were fully justified. 1
Such was the legacy he bequeathed to Lord Melville. When the
Tenth Report on the office of Treasurer was published in April 1805,
Melville found himself charged with misappropriation of funds when he
held that office in 1792. A vote of censure was passed, but in the actual
impeachment (the last of its kind in history) he was acquitted on the
grounds that he was not knowingly responsible for the losses incurred. 2
It was this trial which turned Cobbett into a critic of the government
and made Lord Cochrane, the most brilliant frigate captain of the age,
the radical member for Westminster.
Melville’s fall brought Barham back as the last naval officer to hold
the post of first lord of the Admiralty. The consequence was the virtual
unification of the two boards during a term of office which, though
brief, was of exceptional importance. Besides planning the Trafalgar
campaign, the eighty-year-old Admiral found time for many adminis-
trative reforms. He departmentalised the work of the sea lords and
prohibited serving officers from taking time off to attend sittings of
Parliament, though they were not yet prevented from becoming
members. Regulations of every type were brought up to date, so that
the enlarged edition of the Admiralty Regulations and Instructions for
Officers of 1808 was largely his work. Finally, a new office of Civil
Architect and Engineer was created to replace that of Inspector General
of Naval Works instituted in 1796.
The man who filled these posts until their abolition in 1813 was
General Sir Samuel Bentham, brother of Jeremy Bentham, and a man of
long administrative experience in the Russian service. He did much to
1 Letters of St Vincent, ed. D. Bonner Smith (Navy Records Society, 1922, 1927), vol. 1,
p. 378, vol. n, p. 33. Cf. J. S. Tucker, Life of St Vincent (London, 1844), vol. n, pp. 123, 208.
* Pari. Debates, vol. iv, pp. 255 ff. ; Annual Register ( 1 806), pp. 1 1 2 ff. ; Letters of St Vincent,
vol. n, p. 37.
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WAR AND PEACE IN AN AGE OF UPHEAVAL
modernise the dockyards by introducing the steam engine in 1795 for
pumping work and for driving the machinery invented by Sir Marc
Brunei for the mass production of blocks. Similarly, he employed
Rennie to build the breakwater at Plymouth, which thenceforth replaced
Torbay as the principal anchorage of the Channel fleet. He anticipated
his successor, Sir William Seppings (Surveyor from 1813 to 1832), in
strengthening the build of ships by the use of diagonal trusses and water-
tight compartments, though the Howe of 1815 was the first big ship to
be built under the new system. 1
Apart from the introduction of the elliptical stem and a slight
increase in dimensions, there was little material change in the build of
ships during this period. Since the number of carronades carried on the
upper deck had much increased, the old system of rating ships according
to the number of guns became so confused that in 1816 new rates were
standardised as follows: First Rate, three-decker line-of-battle ships
(over 100 guns and 800 men); Second, Third and Fourth Rate, two-
deckers (of 80, 74 and 50 guns); Fifth and Sixth Rate, single-decked
frigates (of 36 and 24 guns). The latter did not lie in the fine of battle,
their function being that of cruisers. Smaller craft such as gun brigs
and sloops were not post ships, i.e. they were commanded by officers
under the rank of captain. A comparison of the size of the royal dock-
yards in 1803 may be made from the number of shipwrights employed—
420 at Deptford, 360 at Woolwich, 640 at Chatham, 180 at Sheerness,
900 at Portsmouth and 800 at Plymouth. A few of these men were
selected for education at the Royal Naval College, Portsmouth, in order
to form a corps of naval constructors.
The building and repair of the huge fleets employed produced an
even more serious timber shortage than in the previous century. To
build a 74-gun ship of 1730 tons, 1977 loads of oak, 570 of elm, 139 of
fir and 2500 of deal were required at a cost of £47,000. Before the war,
annual timber consumption amounted to some 25,000 loads in addition
to about 80,000 consumed by the merchant service. Foreseeing a
shortage of English oak, a commission recommended the use of fir, so
that during the war a number of ships were built of this material imported
from Canada. Another hitherto untapped source was teak from India,
where Bombay shipwrights built the first frigate of this material in 1805
and before the end of the war several first rates. Other methods adopted
to conserve supplies were the building of ‘ wall sided ’ ships to save the
pieces of curved timber required for the old-fashioned ‘tumble home’,
and the use of iron supports instead of wooden ‘knees’. What chiefly
altered the pattern of trade was Napoleon’s attempt to close the
Baltic, so that between the beginning and end of the war North American
1 See Lady Bentham, Life of Sir S. Bentham (London, 1862;, and Third Report of the
Commission of Enquiry (1805).
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imports had risen from one to fifty-four per cent of the total. A par-
ticularly serious timber crisis occurred in 1803, when St Vincent
attacked the whole system of contracts. The merchants, backed by the
Navy Board and a section of the House of Commons, withheld supplies
until they had secured the fall of the government, thereby jeopardising
the safety of the realm as much by their own selfishness as by the
policy of the enemy. 1
After the introduction of the short-range carronade in 1779 there
were no notable improvements in gunnery until the war was over. British
crews were far better trained in the exercise of the ‘great guns and small
arms’ than their enemies, so that their rate of fire was reckoned at
three rounds in two minutes, though the effective range was not much
above a quarter of a mile. Most actions, however, were fought at even
closer range. ‘I shall of course look at it,’ wrote Nelson to a correspon-
dent who suggested a new type of gunsight, ‘but I hope we shall be able,
as usual, to get so close to our enemies that our shot cannot miss the
object’. 2 Naval officers, in fact, still manoeuvred their ships rather than
their guns in order to bring a full broadside to bear, and most ships
were captured by boarding rather than by sinking, since solid shot was
incapable of sinking a wooden ship unless an accidental explosion
occurred on board. This is the chief reason why naval casualties were
far less than those suffered on land: even at Trafalgar only 449 British
were killed, and of the 4408 enemy losses most were incurred by
drowning in the storm which blew up after the battle. But the reliance
on close range fighting failed when British ships came up against the
American ‘colombiad’, a compromise between the carronade and the
long range gun. Nor was there any uniformity in training, since
responsibility for arming ships lay with the Ordnance Board. Little
use was made of Shrapnel’s invention of an explosive shell in 1787
except with mortars, and the standard of gunnery definitely fell off
during the last ten years of the war. Nevertheless an officer who was
also a gunnery enthusiast could achieve a spectacular success, as Broke
did in the Shannon's victory over the Chesapeake in eleven minutes.
Colonel Sir Howard Douglas was so much impressed with the low stan-
dard of naval gunnery that in 1820 he published a treatise on the subject,
which was adopted in France but neglected in England until he and
some influential friends founded the gunnery school of H.M.S. Excellent
in 1832, one consequence of which was the disbandment of the Marine
Artillery Corps, to which all gunnery problems had previously been
referred.
Two inventions which were to transform naval warfare (though not
1 R. G. Albion, Forests and Sea Power (Cambridge, Mass., 1926), pp. 115, 356. Cf.
Letters of St Vincent, and Naval Chronicle, vol. xn, p. 34.
* Despatches, vol. rv, p. 292.
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WAR AND PEACE IN AN AGE OF UPHEAVAL
for a hundred years to come) were those of the rocket and the submarine.
What its inventor. Sir William Congreve, called ‘the soul of artillery
without the body’ was the incendiary rocket used against Boulogne in
1 804 and on subsequent occasions both by sea and land. Like the rocket,
the submarine was born at this time, but it also failed to develop on
account of the propulsion problem. An underwater attempt had been
made by Bushnell in the American War, but it was the Nautilus which
Robert Fulton, another American, built for the French in 1803 which
was the first ‘plunging boat’. His services were later bought by the
British Admiralty, who employed him in the construction of various
forms of mines and ‘torpedoes’ (as he called them) which were used
against the Boulogne flotilla, though most officers regarded them as
contrary to the rules of war. 1
Fulton’s name is more generally associated with the development of
the steamboat. If William Symington, with his Charlotte Dundas of
1802, may be regarded as the father of marine engineering, Fulton’s
Clermont (1807) was the first commercial paddle steamer in America,
and his double-hulled Demologos (1814) was the first steam warship,
though she was never in action. 2 Since the British navy emerged from
the war with an overwhelming superiority under sail, the Admiralty was
not predisposed to encourage the development of the steam warship,
for which the paddle steamer was ill suited, though tugs do appear in the
Navy List from 1822 onwards. The first steam warship to be used in
action was the Diana in the Burmese War of 1824. The first in European
waters was the Karteria, commanded by Abney Hastings in the Greek
War of Independence. Both Hastings and his superior officer in the
Greek navy, Lord Cochrane, were enthusiastic about the future of steam
and it was their operations in 1827 which precipitated the battle of
Navarino, the last battle to be fought under sail.
The demands on the manpower of the nation made by a war of un-
precedented length and scale may be illustrated by the figures of seamen
voted in 1793 (24,000), in 1797 (120,000) and in 1814 (140,000), from
which the total dropped to 23,000 in 1820. The census of 1801 gives
135,000 seamen voted for the navy and 144,000 employed in the
merchant service, out of a population of only eight million. The
methods of obtaining such numbers remained much the same as before,
though they had to be expanded and supplemented as the strain
intensified. There was little difficulty about obtaining the 3500 officers
required, since the service was more lucrative than the army on account
of the chances of prize money, head money (£5 for each prisoner taken)
1 On Congreve, see Naval Miscellany, vol. iv, pp. 423 (T., and on Fulton see Keith Papers
(Navy Records Society 1955), vol. in, pp. 7 ff.
2 Cf. H. P. Spratt, The Birth of the Steamboat (London, 1958); C. J. Bartlett, Great
Britain and Sea Power, 1815-53 (Oxford, 1963), p. 197.
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and freight money for the conveyance of public treasure. Frigate
captains naturally benefited more than those employed in the block-
ading fleets, but flag officers enjoyed ‘eighths’ of all ships captured
on their station. Thus a commander like Lord Keith received £64,000
for the capture of the Cape, and for four years’ service in the Mediter-
ranean (during which he never fought a battle) his share in prize and
freight money was £1 12,678. Sir Hyde Parker is said to have gained
£200,000 on the West Indian station, and Lord Exmouth £300,000 in the
East Indies. 1 At the beginning of a war an Act ‘for the encouragement
of seamen’ laid down the scale of distribution. Though much money
found its way into the hands of the lawyers of the Vice-Admiralty courts
where prizes were condemned, great fortunes could still be made by
naval officers. Hardship began with the peace, when officers were put
on half pay; since there was no retired list, competition in the upper
ranks of the list became so serious that many found employment outside
the service as soon as the war was over.
The age and source of entry remained much the same as before, the
profession being largely hereditary in families from the south of
England and in the lowlands of Scotland. Although the regulations
continued to be circumvented in order to gain fictitious sea time which
rendered boys eligible for more rapid promotion, the normal age of
entry was about twelve. From 1794 the old style of ‘captain’s servant’
was replaced by that of ‘volunteer, first class’, the second class con-
sisting of future masters and the third of boy seamen. Patronage was
still largely in the hands of captains, though the Admiralty alone
nominated those attending the Naval Academy which in 1806 was
renamed Royal Naval College, Portsmouth. The great majority of
boys, however, went straight to sea.
The order of precedence in a ship was laid down as captain or
commander, lieutenant, sub-lieutenant, master, gunner, boatswain,
carpenter, master’s mate, midshipman. There were many varieties of
midshipman popularly distinguished into youngsters and oldsters,
the latter (who might be of any age) being those who had either failed
to ‘pass for lieutenant’ or were waiting for their commissions. In order
to provide junior officers for the numerous small craft employed, those
of the former class who acted as master’s mates were given the tempor-
ary rank of sub-lieutenant to distinguish them from the real mates
who assisted the master in the navigation of the ship. To reach the rank
of captain, interest was invaluable, and on a distant station astonishing
promotions could be made — the sons of two successive commanders-in-
chief in the East Indies becoming post-captains at the age of seventeen;
thereafter, however, seniority alone counted.
1 C. N. Parkinson, War in the Eastern Seas, 1793-1815 (London, 1954), p. 349; Keith
Papers, vol. in, p. 218; Lewis, Social History of the Navy, pp. 316 ff.
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WAR AND PEACE IN AN AGE OF UPHEAVAL
Sea officers, as they were then called, were distinguished between the
commissioned (or executive) and warrant (or specialist), the latter
being divided between civilians such as the surgeon, purser and chaplain,
and those promoted from petty officer, such as master, gunner, boat-
swain and carpenter. By a number of changes which were finalised in an
Order in Council of 1816 the status of the warrant officers (including
the master) was improved in order to attract the right type of man.
They became eligible for promotion to lieutenant and to wear uniform.
Even the chaplain, who alone failed to benefit from the increase of pay
made early in the war, was in 1812 given a larger salary instead of
depending on seamen’s groats to supplement his official pittance. This
upgrading continued, but opportunities for promotion from the lower
deck diminished. 1 At the same time as the ratings of coxswain, yeoman
and cook were confirmed, such obsolete ratings as trumpeter and
swabber were abolished. A section of the ship’s company which stood
somewhat apart from the crew because of their distinctive uniform and
police duties were the marines, called ‘Royal’ from 1802.
‘The People’ (as the seamen were called) either volunteered, attracted
by the generous bounties offered in wartime, or were impressed by the
Impress Service which in 1793 superseded the old method of sporadic
gangs. Nevertheless, if a ship was short of complement a captain sent
out his own gang, or pressed men out of ships he met at sea. Hitherto
only seafaring men could be legally impressed, but the two Quota
Acts of 1795 (35 G. III. c. 5) specified the number of men to be pro-
vided by the counties and towns of England, e.g. Cambridgeshire 126,
Devon 393, London 5704, Dartmouth 394. Magistrates were told to
conscript from parish fists, to offer bounties to be paid out of the rates,
and to accept substitutes; in practice, if the number was not forth-
coming, they combed the gaols to provide ‘landmen’ who were often
quite unfit for the service. A letter written by Admiral Colfingwood
shortly after the mutinies of 1797 expresses the widely held view that
these ‘quota men’ were at the bottom of the trouble by reason of their
connection with the Corresponding Societies, United Irishmen and the
like (though no direct Jacobin influence has ever been traced): ‘Billy
Pitt’s men, the county volunteers, your ruined politicians, who having
drunk enough ale to drown a nation, and talked nonsense enough to
mad it, are the fellows who have done the business, the seamen who
suffer are only the cat’s paws. . . . What were you to expect from the
refuse of the gallows and the purgings of a gaol, and such make a major-
ity of most ship’s companies in such a war as this ?’ 2 It may be added that
1 Lewis, Social History of the Navy, pp. 44 ff.
* Correspondence of Collingwood, ed. E. Hughes (Navy Records Society, 1957), p. 85.
Cf. C. Gill, Naval Mutinies of 1797 (Manchester, 1913), and G. E. Manwaring and B.
Dobree, The Floating Republic (London, 1935). The men’s petitions are in P.R.O. Adm.
1/5125.
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ARMED FORCES AND THE ART OF WAR
such men (Parker, for example, the leader of the ‘floating republic’ at
the Nore, and Joyce at Spithead) were also responsible for the good
organisation of the outbreaks in April and May 1797.
The neglect of the men’s petitions and the long period of uninspired
leadership in the Channel fleet were the immediate causes of the out-
break, since the demands were based on long-standing grievances. The
pay of an ordinary seaman had remained unchanged at 195. a month
since the Commonwealth. It was now raised to 25 s. 6 d. a month, but
various deductions continued to be made for the support of Greenwich
Hospital, the chaplain on board, the issue of slop clothing (there being
as yet no uniform), and men still had to wait until a ship was paid off
before they received their wage tickets, which were usually exchanged at
grossly unfair discount at the ports. Dishonest victualling was chiefly
responsible for the bad food and the inadequate medical treatment of
which the men also complained. Two improvements in this respect may
be noted — the compulsory issue of lemon juice to combat scurvy, and
the introduction of canned meat in 1813. But it was not possible to
comply with the demand for shore leave on account of the dangers of
desertion, which achieved staggering proportions towards the end of
the war. Nor could there be much relaxation in the severity of discipline
until the war was over. By that time a tendency to humanise condi-
tions in the service had begun which is illustrated by the cessation of the
more brutal forms of punishment such as ‘starting’ with a rope’s end
and running the gauntlet. Furthermore, the methods of pensioning
wounded seamen (the Royal Hospital at Greenwich reached its highest
number of 2700 pensioners at this date) and of taking care of widows and
families worked better than hitherto. For the latter, a number of
fictitious ‘widows’ men’ were carried on the books of a ship, their pay
being devoted to charitable purposes. But that mutiny did not again
break out is due chiefly to the way Nelson had taught his officers the
art of leadership and had, by the example of his victories, raised the
status of seamen in popular esteem.
The strain on the country’s manpower made by the necessity of main-
taining great fleets at sea was intensified by the losses due to disease and
to desertion. An analysis of the 103,660 deaths recorded during the
war suggests that 82 per cent died of disease, 12 per cent by shipwreck
or accident and only 6 per cent by enemy action. To these losses should
be added the 113,273 men who deserted. 1 The fatality due to disease
would have been higher, had it not been for what was virtually a
revolution in naval medicine during the last ten years of the century.
Owing to the persistence of Sir Gilbert Blane and Dr Thomas Trotter,
most of the reforms suggested by James Lind forty years earlier were
now adopted. These included better treatment of the sick on board, the
1 Cf. Lewis, op, cit., p. 442, and W. B. Hodge in Journal of the R. Statistical Society (1855).
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adoption of a ‘divisional’ system which enabled officers to keep a closer
eye on their men, and the elimination of scurvy by the general issue of
lemon juice in 1795-6. Smallpox was also brought under control after
the introduction of vaccination a few years later; but the two major
scourges of typhus and yellow fever remained undefeated. In 1805 the
status of naval surgeons was at last improved when they became
quarter-deck officers with uniforms and increased pay, thereby attracting
a better type of practitioner to the naval service. 1
Two forms of employment which added to the difficulties of recruit-
ment were privateering and the Sea Fencibles. The former was always
frowned on by the authorities because it deprived the service of a
valuable source of manpower. Between 1803 and 1806 some 47,000
men were engaged in privateering, though they cannot have gained much
profit owing to the ubiquity of cruisers. 2 Again, in order to guard
against the dangers of invasion a corps of Sea Fencibles, composed of
fishermen and coastal volunteers, was established in 1798 as a sea
militia to man the chain of Martello towers and signal stations around
the coast, and to provide a last line of defence with their boats. It was
never an effective force, and it provided an escape for many who would
otherwise have been enlisted for service at sea. It is significant that the
force reached its greatest strength of 23,455 men in 1810 when the danger
of invasion was long past. 3
An analysis of the average ship’s company would show about the
following proportions: volunteers 15 per cent, pressed men 50 per cent,
quota men 12 per cent, boys 8 per cent, foreigners 15 per cent. 4 Some
of the latter were there of their own free will, but most had been
impressed at sea and were unable to obtain their release through the
normal consular channels. The most important element among such
men were the Americans, partly because of the expansion of their
merchant marine with the decline in the number of ships belonging to
belligerent powers, partly because the number of forged citizenship
papers made it difficult to distinguish between genuine Americans and
British deserters. It was probably this which accounts for the small
proportion of Americans released on official request — 273 between
1803 and 1805 out of 1500 applications. In 1812 it was estimated that
over 6000 Americans were serving in British ships, of whom 2500 were
imprisoned for refusing to take up arms against their own country. 6
According to J. Q. Adams, it was the insistence on the right of search
1 See C. Lloyd and J. L. S. Coulter, Medicine and the Navy, vol. in (Edinburgh, 1961).
* J. Barrow, Life of Anson (London, 1839), p. 467. Some 4000 letters of marque were
issued during the course of the war; see Register of Issues, Adm. 7/325.649.
3 Keith Papers, vol. m, pp. 133 ff. 4 Lewis, op. cit., p. 139.
3 J. F. Zimmerman, Impressment of American Seamen (New York, 1925), p. 106. Cf.
A. Steel in Camb. Hist. Journal, vol. ix (1949), pp. 331-51; and T. Roosevelt, The War of
1812 (New York, 1882), p. 42.
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ARMED FORCES AND THE ART OF WAR
which was the principal cause of the war of 1 8 1 2- 1 4, though the root of the
trouble probably lay in the demand for the conquest of Canada. The
British claim to search neutrals not only for contraband but also for
deserters rested on the view expressed by Lord Stowell that ‘the funda-
mental principle of maritime jurisdiction is that ships upon the high seas
compose no part of the territory of the state’. Diametrically opposed
was the American principle of ‘free ships, free goods’, or as their
pendants proclaimed, ‘free trade and sailor’s rights.’ This long-standing
quarrel might easily have resulted in war in 1806, when a party from
H.M.S. Leopard took off a deserter and three others whose citizenship
was ambiguous from the U.S.S. Chesapeake only ten miles off Cape
Henry. Reparations were refused and the situation remained un-
altered until 1812. On the eve of the war the obnoxious Order in Council
which compelled neutrals to trade under British licence was revoked,
but while the government might forego some of its pretensions it never
surrendered the right to reclaim deserters. Nor was the subject men-
tioned in the peace treaty.
The obstinacy of the British government was based on a supremacy
at sea won by a navy now rendered negligent by success. To the vast
fleets which ringed the coasts of Europe, the Americans could only
oppose eight frigates and eight smaller ships. But this force was of sur-
prising efficiency, considering the neglect of the American navy before
1798. In that year the Navy Department was established, and also a
Marine Corps of 720 men. The necessity of protecting the growing
commerce of a young nation had, in fact, made the revival of a navy
essential, in spite of the fears entertained in some quarters that the
establishment of armed forces on a permanent basis might prove a
threat to the democratic way of life. By 1812 man-power had increased
to 4000 men (all volunteers) and 500 officers, many of whom had
experience during the ‘quasi- war’ with Republican France or against
the Algerine corsairs. But the chief reason for the successes during the
first year of the war with Britain was the fact that their three 44-gun
frigates were designed by Joshua Humphreys to be superior to any
European frigate. Ships of all nations were underrated at this date
owing to the increase in the number of upper deck guns, so that a
44-gun frigate carried in addition some 22 carronades. Such well-
armed, well-fought ships proved more than a match for 38-gun British
frigates. Nevertheless as the Peninsular war drew to a finish the massive
weight of British sea power was transferred to the American coast to
enable landings to be made (one of which burned Washington) and
coastal traffic to be strangled, from which Mahan drew the strategic
conclusion that ‘not by rambling operations, or naval duels, are wars
decided, but by force massed and handled in skilful combination’. 1
1 A. T. Mahan, Sea Power in Us Relations to the War of 1812 (London, 1905), vol. 1, p. v.
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WAR AND PEACE IN AN AGE OF UPHEAVAL
Privateering, however, still flourished on that side of the Atlantic.
Whereas in the course of the war American warships took only 165
prizes, American privateers made 1344 captures, some of which were
extremely valuable. Nor were the Nova Scotians backward in this form
of activity, though a comparison of the number of prizes condemned at
Halifax shows the more important part played by naval commerce
destruction, 200 prizes being brought in by privateers as compared with
490 by cruisers. 1 Had not an efficient convoy system been instituted by
this date, British losses at the hands of American privateers would have
been considerably greater.
Britain emerged from the twenty years of naval war on a world scale
with unchallenged superiority at sea. Though conquests such as Java
were restored in the interests of future peace, a chain of bases now
secured the route to the East: Ascension, St Helena, the Cape,
Mauritius and Ceylon. In spite of war losses, the number of registered
merchant vessels had increased from 16,079 t0 24,418, representing a
tonnage increase of over a million tons. 2 At the same time her naval
force of 1 168 warships, 240 of them ships of the line, was vastly superior
to that of any other nation. The navies of France, Spain, Holland,
Denmark and the United States had been defeated, while those of
Sweden and Russia were at this date of small account. The era during
which British naval power reigned almost unchallenged had begun,
although the age of warfare under sail was closing and that of the iron
steamship and the explosive shell was about to dawn.
1 Lists printed by Essex Institute, Salem, 1911. Cf. J. Maclay, History of American
Privateering (1899).
8 C. E. Fayle, The Trade Winds, ed. Parkinson (London, 1948), p. 83.
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CHAPTER IV
REVOLUTIONARY INFLUENCES AND
CONSERVATISM IN LITERATURE AND
THOUGHT
T he fact that the French Revolution was something unprecedented,
exceptional, and portentous for the future of Europe and per-
haps the world did not escape the notice of some contemporaries.
Edmund Burke, its fiercest antagonist, perceived as early as 1790 that
he was witnessing the first ‘complete revolution’. Kant predicted in
1798 that such a phenomenon could never be obliterated from the
memory of mankind. Some twenty-five years later, Stendhal declared:
‘In the two thousand years of recorded world history so sharp a
revolution in customs, ideas, and beliefs has perhaps never occurred
before.’ Even so critical an observer as the German nationalist Arndt
had to admit in retrospect: ‘I should be very ungrateful and also a
hypocrite if I did not avow that we owe an immense amount to that
savage and crazy revolution . . . and that it has put ideas into people’s
heads and hearts which twenty or thirty years before the event most
men would have shuddered to conceive of.’
From the very outset the Revolution had a profound impact on
Europe’s intellectuals. At that early stage delight by far prevailed upon
dismay. Indeed, it was widely felt that a new world was opening to the
astonished sight. William Wordsworth immortalised that frame of
mind in The Prelude :
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive
And to be young was very heaven.
And Coleridge, his friend and collaborator, vividly recalled how ‘ from
the general heart of human kind Hope sprang forth like a full-born
Deity’. The young poet Southey, Thomas Holcroft the dramatist, and
the radicals Thomas Paine and Sir James Mackintosh, no less ardently
embraced the principles of the Revolution. Burke’s attack was followed
within a few months by Mackintosh’s warm apologia in Vindiciae
Gallicae (April 1791).
In Germany intellectual circles were deeply moved by the Revolution.
Forty years later Hegel compared that era to a marvellous sunrise.
Other leading thinkers of his generation such as Fichte and Schelling,
but also the aged Kant, the poets Klopstock, Wieland and Holderlin,
and the historians Herder, Johannes Muller and Schlozer, to name but
a few outstanding examples, all welcomed the Revolution in no
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uncertain terms. This attitude was further disseminated by German eye-
witnesses in Paris who sent back long and glowing reports. Elsewhere
the Austrian reformer Sonnenfels, the Swiss educationalist Pestalozzi,
the Italian poet Alfieri, the young Spanish writer Marchena, the
Swedish publicist Thorild, as well as a host of others, helped to swell the
almost universal echo. Indeed, Arthur O’Connor was not exaggerating
when he declared in a speech to the Irish Parliament in May 1795 that
‘the whole European mind had undergone a revolution neither confined
to this or that country, but as general as the great causes which had given
it birth and still continued to feed its growth’.
This widespread enthusiasm was based upon a variety of motives at
the root of which lay the amazing social and political optimism of the
age. Belief in the perfectibility of man and society, that central dogma
of the Enlightenment, had by now reached its greatest intensity. In
1784, Kant had confidently asserted: ‘By each revolution the seed of
enlightenment is more and more developed.’ Now in 1792, he still
firmly believed in the inevitability of human progress towards ever
increasing intellectual and moral perfection. The widespread and
fervent acclaim of the Revolution was itself proof to Kant that there
existed an altruistic moral fibre in mankind, at least in its basic make-up ;
for, as he pointed out, it needed courage and unselfishness to manifest
pro-revolutionary sympathies. 1
In France, the chief apostle of the idea of man-made progress was the
Marquis de Condorcet, author of the celebrated Esquisse d’uti tableau
historique des progres de V esprit humain, composed during the troubled
days of 1793-4. Even at the height of the Terror, while himself in
mortal danger, Condorcet firmly clung to his belief in the indefinite
moral improvement of mankind, and in April 1794 died a martyr to his
secular faith. The brightest prospects for mankind firmly set before his
eyes, he had concluded his Esquisse with the brave if pathetic words:
Such contemplation is for him an asylum, in which the memory of his persecutors
cannot pursue him; there he lives in thought with man restored to his natural rights
and dignity, forgets man tormented and corrupted by greed, fear or envy; there he
lives with his peers in an Elysium created by reason and graced by the purest
pleasures known to the love of mankind. 2
In his Inquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals
and Happiness (1793), William Godwin, whose influence in England
was seminal, envisaged a secular paradise hardly distinguishable from
earlier Christian millenarian expectations. His prophecy, ‘in that
blessed day there will be no war,’ harmonised well with the still pre-
valent ideal of cosmopolitan Fraternity, that secularised version of the
1 Kant’s essay. Whether the Human Race is continually advancing towards the Better,
written in 1792, could not be published until six years later.
* Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, translated by June
Barraclough (London, 1955), p. 202.
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ideal of Christian brotherhood. Closely akin was the widespread belief
which Montesquieu had formulated in the words: ‘The spirit of the
republic is peace.’ For not only in revolutionary France but elsewhere
too, it was expected that, once the absolute dynasties, those age-old
troublemakers, were overthrown, war itself would cease to plague
mankind; at least, war, as the Sport of Kings, would never be waged
again. It was tempting to infer that the peoples, in their novel capacity
as rulers, would sweep war aside since it could not be in their interest to
become involved in it. This is why Kant, for example, was so greatly
impressed by the striving on the part of the French for a representative
regime which he maintained ‘cannot be bellicose’. For the same reason
he interpreted the fall of the absolute monarchy as the first step towards
a federation of States ruled on representative lines. Kant had by now
come to regard war as the greatest obstacle to morality, but was
realistic enough not to share the fairly widespread illusion that the
abolition of that supreme social evil lay just round the corner. What he
envisaged in his famous essay On Perpetual Peace (1795) was rather a
gradual process which would be characterised by an ever-growing
respect for public international law. Little by little wars would be
rendered more humane, then less frequent, until aggression would be
abolished altogether.
Another aspect of the faith in progress was the hope that the French
Revolution would usher in the longed-for Age of Reason. Although
anti-rationalist doctrines, never extinct in the eighteenth century, were
by now visibly gaining ground, the adoration of reason in general, and
of rationalism in politics in particular, was still very much en vogue.
William Godwin held reason to be an infallible guide to truth and
goodness. Having been brought up on a particularly stern version of
the Calvinist faith, he soon came to reject all religion as fettering the
free use of man’s rational faculties, and ended by idolising the intellect
itself. Unalloyed human reason, systematised in a body of rational
laws, was to be the panacea for all the political and social afflictions of
mankind. Kant and Hegel, Condorcet and Godwin, and many kindred
minds, were all dreaming of a Kingdom of Reason, and many felt
confident that their generation was experiencing the first stages of its
establishment on earth. Hegel, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of
History (1830), drew this enthusiastic picture of their state of mind at
the time of the first constitutional experiments of the Revolution:
All of a sudden, the Idea, the conception of Right, asserted its authority, and the
old framework of injustice could offer no resistance to its onslaught. In this way, a
constitution was established in harmony with the idea of Right, and everything was
henceforth to be based on this foundation. Never since the sun has stood in the
firmament and the planets revolved around him had it been perceived that man’s
existence centres in his head, that is in thought, inspired by which he builds up the
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world of reality. Anaxagoras had been the first to say that >>o0j governs the World,
but not until now had man advanced to the recognition of the principle that thought
ought to govern spiritual reality. . . . All thinking beings shared in the jubilation
of this epoch . 1
Paradoxically, it was on precisely opposite grounds that the French
Revolution was hailed in other quarters. Among those affected by the
romantic movement, now unfolding, the idea was prevalent that the
Revolution had inaugurated the establishment of human life on a basis
of pure feeling. Nor could it be denied that strong irrational forces,
hitherto kept in check by the hierarchic society of the past, had been
unleashed by the revolution, a turn of events which the romantics,
critical as they were of the excesses of rationalism, could not but regard
as highly auspicious. In a sense it might even be said that the eruption
of irrational, or subconscious, impulses that characterised so many
aspects of the French Revolution was the signal for the romantic
battle against reason. Both movements were also united in their
impassioned striving for freedom. The ideal of Liberte which enjoyed
pride of place in the tripartite war-cry of the Revolution blended
naturally with the subjectivist attitude that characterised European
Romanticism especially in its initial stages. The emancipation of the
self, as this trend has been called, was comparable to, but far in excess
of, a similar tendency in the Renaissance. Time-honoured bonds of
allegiance and belief had been loosened for some time past, but the
Revolution had brought that process to a head. Suddenly, all ideas and
ideals were once again in the melting pot, and thus the individual self
appeared to some of the early romantics to be the only firm anchor.
Fichte not only developed an epistemological system on highly sub-
jectivist lines, but even declared that virtue and vice existed only in so
far as the individual’s conscience conceived them. This extreme view
influenced Friedrich Schlegel, the young daredevil thinker, and some of
his associates. Nor was the romantic quest for freedom confined to the
individual. According to Friedrich’s brother August Wilhelm, each
national community had its own genius and must therefore be free to
develop its own artistic mode of expression in literature as well as in the
other arts. Clearly the time was over when all cultured nations could
be expected to conform to the rigid standards of classical French taste.
Cultural patriotism thus became one of the chief by-products of
romanticism. Nevertheless, it will be seen that the attitude of the
romantics to the Revolution was complex and by no means un-
equivocally favourable.
Whereas the revolutionary aspirations for liberty and fraternity, after
a promising overture, soon met with disappointment and frustration,
1 Vorlesungen iiber die Philosophic der Geschichte, in Werke (Berlin, 1840 ), vol. rx,
PP- 535-&
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the great and embittered struggle for equality had a more lasting
impact. The egalitarian zeal, which according to Chateaubriand (who
deplored it) had become the dominant political passion in France,
spread like wild-fire to other European countries and eventually to the
four corners of the globe, passing in the process through all kinds of
vicissitudes without exhausting its impetus. Like all great human ideals,
the principle of equality was capable of several divergent interpreta-
tions. It could for example signify the dignity possessed by all human
beings regardless of their social rank. This was the theme of Robert
Burns’s song A Man's a Man for a' that (1795). Or it could mean the
gradual abolition of economic inequality. Thus Thomas Paine, in
The Rights of Man, as early as 1791, advocated the public provision of
educational services and a system of taxation which, in the cause of
social justice, would lead to the redistribution of incomes. It is in the
same vein that the Declaration des droits de I'homme et du citoyen (1789)
asserts that all men, by virtue of their humanity, have an equal right to
well-being and the pursuit of happiness, an idea which the famous
French scientist Lavoisier — who later fell a victim to the Terror — was
probably the first to proclaim as a political doctrine. 1 Taking the idea
one stage further, Kant went so far as to reject all hereditary privileges,
so that everybody might start life with an equal chance. He also pointed
out that the citizens’ equality before the law should be regarded as one
of man’s fundamental and indeed inalienable rights. Unless it were given
effect, his ideal of a Rechtsstaat, a State where the rule of law prevails,
could never be established. Babeuf, self-styled Tribune of the People,
and some of his fellow conspirators of 1796 carried egalitarianism to its
logical conclusion by including in their social programme the com-
munity of goods, and the establishment of ‘a true society where there
should be neither rich nor poor’. On the political plane, the idea of
equality also implied the right of the citizen, simply as a member of the
community, to take part in the formation of the general will. In this
way the political centre of gravity came to be shifted from the monarch
to the people or the nation as the source of all sovereignty. In this
respect the American and French Declarations of the Rights of Man
mark a momentous phase in the world-wide movement towards
democracy. In Paine’s Rights of Man, these democratic achievements
are recorded in a challenging manner. Ranke expressed the opinion
that no other political idea of the last century had an impact com-
parable to that exerted by the idea of popular sovereignty which he
described as ‘the perpetually mobile ferment of the modern world’. 2
1 In the Instructions drafted in 1789 by Lavoisier, as a deputy, for his own constituents.
Oeuvres, tome vi (Paris, 1893), p. 335.
1 Englische Geschichte, vornehmlich im sechszehnten und siebzehnten Jahrhundert (Berlin,
1861), vol. m, pp. 287-8. English edn. (Oxford, 1875), vol. n, p. 542.
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The idea of equality once conceived could not fail to lead to the
demand for equal treatment and equal opportunity for the sexes. Thus
Condorcet argued in 1790: ‘Either not a single individual of the human
species has any true rights, or else all have the same, and he who votes
against the rights of another, whether on account of religion, colour or
sex, henceforth renounces his own rights.’ 1 Support for the cause of
female emancipation was certainly not lacking from the side of the
hitherto privileged sex. Jeremy Bentham, Friedrich Schlegel and
Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel are examples of men who greatly helped
to propagate the movement. Hippel, in his treatise fiber die biirgerliche
Verbesserung der Weiber (1792), voiced his astonishment that France,
despite her preoccupation with equality, had not yet raised the legal
status of women. The National Assembly in Paris indeed refused a
petition for women’s suffrage, and on 30 October 1793 the Convention
forcibly suppressed all women’s clubs that had sprung up in the earlier
stages of the Revolution. It has been suggested that this anti-feminist
turn of events may have been connected with the trial and execution of
Queen Marie-Antoinette which took place in the same month.
In this context the fate of a woman pioneer of the movement is worth
recording. Shortly before the Revolution, Olympe de Gouges, illegit-
imate daughter of a poet and herself a minor playwright, published
her novel, Prince Philosophe, in which she pleaded that women be
granted equality in education. Once the turmoil had started she threw
herself into the fray. Her journal V Impatient — one of many activities —
was followed in September 1791 by her bold Declaration des Droits de
la Femme et de la Citoyenne. Soon, however, alienated by her feeling
that female emancipation was being shelved and by her abhorrence of
the king’s trial, she became a violent critic of Jacobin dictatorship.
On 3 November 1793, having dared to write an open letter to Robes-
pierre, she paid under the guillotine the current price for such audacity.
Her defiant feminism is poignantly expressed in Article 10 of the
Declaration : ‘Woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must
also have the right to mount the tribune’.
In England — later to be in the van of women’s emancipation — Mary
Wollstonecraft, who was of Irish extraction, caused a stir by A Vindica-
tion of the Rights of Women (1792). Here she advocated equal educa-
tional opportunities, including even co-education, and pleaded that
men and women should meet on the ground of their common humanity.
The background of this treatise is revealed in the fragment of her novel
The Wrongs of Woman, found among her posthumous papers. Un-
happy marriages, drunkenness, squalor, poverty, childbirth, but above
all the tyranny of the brutal male over the helpless female, all these were
1 ‘Sur l’admission des femmes au droit de cite,’ published in 1790 in the Journal de la
Societe de 1789.
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actual recollections woven into the work of fiction. Towards the end
of her short and tempestuous life she became the wife of William
Godwin, though both of them disapproved of the institution of marriage.
The birth of her child Mary, who was to become Shelley’s second
wife, proved fatal to her, and she died in 1797.
In other directions too the principle of equality was extended as a
result of the Revolution. The conception of common citizenship made
it impossible to maintain the disabilities of the Jews. The age-old
prejudice against these humiliated outlaws of European society had
already been softened during the Age of Enlightenment. John Locke
and John Toland had pleaded for the toleration of the Jews, and in
1740 the British Parliament had passed a naturalisation act for the
American colonies which greatly advanced the general cause of equality
for the Jews in that part of the world. When the colonies broke away
from the motherland, the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776
established general equality without specifically mentioning the Jews.
In Germany, the humanitarian idea of religious toleration found
expression in Lessing’s drama Nathan der Weise (1779). Significantly,
its hero was drawn from Lessing’s friend Moses Mendelssohn, born in
the ghetto of Dessau, but by now a philosopher of wide renown. Two
years later, the high Prussian official Christian Wilhelm Dohm published
in Berlin his influential treatise Uber die burgerliche Verbesserung der
Juden.
France was the first European country to grant the Jews full civil
rights. Mirabeau’s work Sur Moses Mendelssohn et sur la reforme
politique des Juifs (1787) put their case eloquently, regretting that so
gifted a nation should for so long have been deprived of the chance of
developing its powers. ‘Once its members are in full possession of
civil rights,’ Mirabeau concluded, ‘they will soon be raised to the level
of useful citizens’. In the same year a Jewish spokesman declared: ‘We
ask neither grace, favour nor privilege, but a law which will enable us
to participate in the Rights of Man, which all men should share with-
out exception. We demand also that the barrier that separates us from
other citizens be removed, for we are no longer prepared to endure the
humiliating distinction between ourselves and other men.’ While the
issue of Jewish Emancipation was discussed in the National Assembly,
two other Jewish writers, Cerf Berr and Salkind Hurwitz, did their
utmost to propagate the cause. Among those who supported it in the
Assembly were Mirabeau, Robespierre and, most emphatically, Abbe
Gregoire. On 28 September 1791 Jews were declared equal citizens in
France. Thus the signal was given for the gradual emancipation of
European Jewry, a process which seemed, deceptively, to have been
completed by the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Finally, the idea of equality proved utterly incompatible with the
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toleration of slavery. It was on egalitarian grounds that the French
Societe des Amis des Noirs came into being and that the Constituent
Assembly declared the slaves in French colonial possessions to be
citizens of France. The final abolition of slavery owed as much to
French revolutionary principles as it did to the strong religious feeling
which characterised the English abolitionist movement.
As for the odious slave trade, it was fitting that Britain should take a
leading role in its abolition, for during the eighteenth century she con-
trolled more than half its total volume. The degradation of human
nature involved in it had been denounced by a host of Christian and
humanitarian writers and poets, notably John Wesley, Baxter, Thomson
and Cowper, but also by Adam Smith, Dr Johnson and David Hartley,
son of the author of Observations on Man. However it was the Quakers
who first took concerted political action. Again, as in the case of Jewish
emancipation, the movement originated in America where its chief
exponents were John Woolman (1720-72) and Anthony Benezet
(1713-84), the latter the son of a French Huguenot who left France
after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. It was largely due to
Benezet’s efforts that a universal effort of propaganda on both sides of
the Atlantic was launched in favour of abolition. In England, the
Quakers in 1783 founded an association ‘for the relief and liberation of
negro slaves in the West Indies, and for the discouragement of the slave
trade on the coast of Africa’. Three years later, young Thomas Clark-
son published the English version of a Latin prize essay suggested by
Dr Peckard, vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, under the title
Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species. Clarkson,
who was the most indefatigable champion of abolition, had for his
collaborators a group of humanitarian evangelicals, the so-called
‘Clapham sect’, led by Henry Thornton, Zachary Macaulay and
Granville Sharp, whose parliamentary spokesman was the influential
William Wilberforce. The abolitionists refrained from an all-out
attack on the institution of slavery itself as they were of the opinion that
the ending of the slave trade would not only compel planters to treat
their slaves more humanely, but would also lead in the long run to
emancipation. Opposition to the proposed reform on the part of West
Indian planters as well as other vested interests was formidable, and
some politicians who had originally supported the abolitionist move-
ment abandoned it when, influenced by the events in France, they had
come to regard it as ‘a shred of the accursed web of Jacobinism’
(Burke).
Although gradual abolition had been agreed upon in the Commons
in 1792, it was not until 1807 that Wilberforce carried a bill in Parlia-
ment which forbade British subjects and British ships from taking any
part in the slave trade. Similar legislation was enacted in the United
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States in the same year. It was with a deep sense of satisfaction that,
in 1808, Thomas Clarkson brought out his well-documented history of
the British abolition. 1 But it was not until 1811 that the British prohi-
bition was given greater effect by the stipulation that henceforth
offences were to be treated as felonies. Under considerable pressure
from Britain, involving among other things a naval patrol off the
African coast, the other slave-trading European countries (with the
exception of Denmark which had preceded Britain) followed the
British example in the course of the first decades of the nineteenth
century. This was in due course followed by the abolition of slavery
itself.
It was suggested above that the upsurge of cultural patriotism was
connected with the romantic quest for freedom of expression. The
political doctrine of nationalism was, however, more complex in its
origins. Although cultural patriotism with its marked emotional over-
tones was certainly one of its ingredients, another equally important
one was the democratic idea of popular sovereignty. Springing from
the combination of those two ideas in the French Revolution, national-
ism soon showed its explosive force in other parts of Europe and beyond.
States that were not homogeneous in their institutions and culture were
undermined under its revolutionary impact when oppressed national
communities were clamouring for a redress of their grievances. Wolfe
Tone was not unjustified in calling Ireland ‘an oppressed, insulted and
plundered nation’. As a disciple of Danton and Thomas Paine and
founder of the society for the United Irishmen (1791), he drew his
principles from the French example. His views, uncompromising from
the first, came to be adopted by most of his followers, once they realised
that a liberal measure of parliamentary reform in Ireland could not be
attained by constitutional methods: Edmund Burke’s perspicacious
Letters to Sir Hercules Langrishe, advocating the admission of the
Irish Catholics to the franchise, had fallen on deaf ears. Wolfe Tone’s
attempt in 1798 at an armed rebellion for an Irish republic ended in
failure and the execution of the leader. His posthumously published
autobiography is the most remarkable work of this era of Irish life.
This and other nationalist insurrections, mostly abortive, threatened to
break up some larger political units, and the same was true of national
resistance against the Napoleonic regime in Europe. But nationalism
could act in precisely the opposite sense when, for the sake of unifica-
tion, a host of smaller political entities were attacked and eventually
destroyed. Thus the drastic changes wrought by Napoleon in Germany
and Italy paved the way for the future unification of the German and
Italian nations.
1 History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave
Trade by the British Parliament. 2 vols. (London, 1808).
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The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga has drawn a useful distinction
between patriotism and nationalism. With the former the prevailing
sentiment, he suggests, is one of attachment, whereas with the latter the
feeling of pride prevails, which only too often leads to overweening
arrogance and aggression. In reality the two sentiments, though some-
times clearly distinguishable, were apt to merge into one another;
for example, Jacobin patriotism soon degenerated into an aggressive
nationalism which produced or at any rate reinforced a patriotic
reaction among its victims. In any event, nationalism as it developed
during this era not only clashed with the ideal of cosmopolitan frater-
nity, but increasingly also with that of the individual’s liberty. Jacobins
such as Barere or Carnot, and later Fichte in his Addresses to the German
Nation (1807), extolled the nation at the expense of the individual.
This sentiment, natural in a time of crisis, became a settled dogma when
Hegel insisted that the individual had real liberty only through merging
his will into that of the historical will of the community. Thus two of the
basic ideals of humanitarian Enlightenment were already in full retreat
at the time of the Jacobin dictatorship. If the outbreak of the Revolu-
tion in France coincided with the highwatermark of enlightened
expectations, the wave began to ebb in the critical years from 1793
onwards. The resulting mood of disenchantment has aptly been
described as ‘The frustration of the enlightenment’. 1 Against this
background the origins of conservatism may be studied.
Naturally, the protagonists of the Enlightenment were loath to admit
their disappointment. Kant, in his essay Der Streit der Fakultdten
(1798), tried to console himself with the reflection that the misdeeds of
the Jacobins were nothing to those of the tyrants of past time. Admit-
ting that the Revolution had outwardly been a failure, he still insisted
that in the long run it was bound to prove a blessing to mankind.
Similar views were expressed by Fichte. More generally, however,
the Terror and French aggression engendered feelings of consternation
and bitter disillusionment. The grim and relentless work done by the
guillotine, on the Place de la Concorde, could hardly fail to act as an
eye-opener. Jens Baggesen, the Danish poet, who had previously
hailed the Revolution with a Hymn to Freedom, now composed his
powerful ode To the Furies. In Germany, Friedrich Schiller and other
idealists realised that the idea of liberty too could be abused and that
reason as well as religion could be prostituted to hideous purposes.
France, so it now seemed to Schiller, was not sufficiently educated for
equality. Soon after accepting French citizenship as the author of the
impetuous drama Die Rduber, he grew violently antagonistic to the
Revolution. Like Giambattista Vico before him, he now concluded that
1 Alfred Cobban, In Search of Humanity. The Role of the Enlightenment in Modern
History (London, i960).
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a decaying culture produces a worse state of anarchy and corruption
than does barbarism. The deepest insight was perhaps shown by the
poet Holderlin: ‘What has transformed the State into a hell is pre-
cisely that man has tried to transform it into his heaven.’
In England, too, many former admirers of the Revolution now
became its adversaries. Wordsworth was plunged into profound
dejection by its horrors and expressed his mood in The Prelude:
And now, become oppressors in their turn
Frenchmen had changed a war of self-defence
For one of conquest, losing sight of all
Which they had struggled for: and mounted up
Openly, in the view of earth and heaven
The scale of liberty.
Coleridge’s political conversion is marked by the magnificent ode
Recantation (1797). A year later it seemed to him that ‘rulers are
much the same in all ages, and under all forms of government; they are
as bad as they dare to be’. His reaction was however less violent than
that of his friends. Many years later he declared that, though he had
never been a Jacobin, there was much good in their creed and that
the errors of the opposite party were equally gross and far less excusable.
It was only after 1815 that he became more alarmed at the growth of
what he still called Jacobinism. Southey, on the other hand, already
before the turn of the century completely discarded his earlier views
and became a rigid conservative. It has been suggested that he may have
been the first to use the term ‘Conservative’ in its modern sense. 1
Before it was possible for a conservative outlook on politics to be
developed, it was necessary that the dangers of the Revolution should
be fully appreciated. No other thinker had done so much in this
direction as the Dublin-born Whig statesman Edmund Burke. Already
in his celebrated Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) Burke
realised that an element of tyranny was inherent in mass democracy,
and also that the Revolution, because of its quasi-religious character,
was imbued with the spirit of proselytism. He used the whole armoury
of the conservative onslaught against revolutionary doctrines, dwelling
above all on the benefits of political and social continuity. Society, he
insisted, is a partnership between those who are living, those who are
dead, and those who are yet to be born. Of all the great traditions of the
past, the spirit of chivalry found in him its most fervent champion.
The characteristic passage bears quotation in full: ‘The age of chivalry
is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded;
and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more
shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud
submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart,
1 Geoffrey Carnall, Robert Southey and His Age (Oxford, i960).
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which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom.
The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of
manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone! It is gone, that sensi-
bility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like
a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which
ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its
evil by losing all its grossness’. Like most early exponents of a creed,
Burke certainly overstated his case. Consequently, it was easy for his
opponents — Philip Francis, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and
others — to charge him with callous indifference to the misdeeds of the
ancien regime and to the sufferings of the French people before 1789.
Nevertheless, Burke’s thought exerted a wide influence in England and
abroad.
From rulers downwards came a chorus of praise. Catherine the
Great and Stanislas, the last king of Poland, were as enthusiastic as
was King George III. In Germany, Novalis hailed the Reflections as a
revolutionary book written against the Revolution. A German
translation, with numerous notes and appendices, was undertaken by
the Silesian-bom Prussian publicist Friedrich Gentz, who had at first
welcomed the events of 1789 in glowing terms, but had changed his
opinion, on the second or third perusal of the Reflections, just at the
time when Prussia shifted from alert neutrality to outright war. Gentz
inscribed his version to King Frederick William II, and also addressed a
letter to the king on 23 December 1792, declaring that his steadfast
intention of opposing French sophistry had led him to translate ‘the
strongest refutation of the revolutionary ideas which had appeared in
any language’ and that in an appended volume he himself ‘sought to
develop on political and philosophical grounds a complete theory of
the anti-revolutionary system’. Soon afterwards Gentz duly received
the long-coveted title of Kriegsrat. In a powerful reply to Mackintosh,
he elaborated with the zeal of a convert his theme of the contrast
between the early ideals and the grim realities of the Revolution.
Goethe, like Burke, rejected the Revolution from the very outset.
Already then a man of forty, he illustrated his own general rule that, if
youth inclines to democratic views, middle age is apt to see worth in
aristocracies. His administrative experiences at the model court of
Weimar, where he had settled in 1776, strengthened his conviction that
reforms must come from above, and that order was more precious than
liberty. Though no apologist of the old regime, Goethe was deeply
disquieted by several aspects of the Revolution, particularly the
tendency of politics to become all-pervading. The resulting state of
perpetual unrest made people ‘as on a sick-bed’ throw themselves
incessantly from one political side to the other. The proliferation of
political parties and journals seemed to him unhealthy, and his comedy
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Der Burgergeneral (1793) expressed his strong dislike of propaganda.
Most of all, the Frankfurt patrician dreaded an uprising of the inchoate
masses who, he predicted, would fall an easy prey to unscrupulous
demagogues and ruthless tyrants. As a result, European culture, the
growth of centuries, might one day be swept aside. These forebodings
resemble those of Erasmus during the upheaval of the Reformation.
The positive contribution of the romantics to revolutionary thought
has already been noticed briefly. It was the idea of liberty that appealed
to revolutionaries and romantics alike. On the other hand, some lead-
ing romantic thinkers were among the earliest critics of revolutionary
egalitarianism, at least in its more far-reaching implications. They
feared that the educated classes might one day become swamped by the
masses. European culture, in the process of being levelled down, might
thus become vulgarised out of existence, a fate which according to some
ancient historians had overtaken the ancient Roman civilisation.
Coleridge on one occasion scornfully spoke of mob-adulation which
attributed wisdom to the majority of mankind. In Germany Holderlin,
Friedrich Schlegel, Gorres and Schelling, in France Stendhal, Alfred de
Vigny and others all lamented the horrid prospect of a mass civilisation
with its progressive encroachment on individual freedom. Madame de
Stael, too, foresaw an age when the victorious masses would demand that
superior individuals should debase their standards to please their
inferiors, now the masters. And her admirer Benjamin Constant — a
liberal — wrote to a friend: ‘You and I were not meant to live in this
century. . . . Today there are no more individuals, only battalions in
uniform’. And he added pathetically: ‘We poor devils, who go on
wearing our own clothes instead of a uniform, no longer know where
we belong.’
Those who like Alfred de Vigny or the Silesian poet Joseph von
Eichendorff belonged to the elites of the past naturally tended to
deplore the passing of the age of feudalism and chivalry. So too, Adam
Mickiewicz, in his great epic poem Pan Tadeusz, depicted nostalgically
in glowing colours the traditional but vanished life among Polish
gentlefolk in his own Lithuania. Indeed, so marked was the anti-
egalitarian leitmotif in the European romantic movement, at any rate
before 1830, that some historians have interpreted romanticism as the
swan song of the European nobility. To be sure, there is more than a
grain of truth in this view; to the list of romantic noblemen could be
added, in the front rank, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Musset, Byron,
and Leopardi. Among other romantics who had no claim to nobility,
some also felt nostalgia for the bygone age of relatively fixed social
hierarchies. Here the originator of the Waverley novels springs to
mind. True, Goethe’s drama of the Sturm und Drang period, Goetz von
Berlichingen, had already inaugurated the tradition of chivalry plays,
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but the genre of the chivalry novel began later and owed its widest appeal
to Scott’s imaginative gifts. The whole of his work, ingeniously com-
bining feudal and patriotic sentiment, was steeped in the traditions
of the past, and was brought to life by the fact that the age of heroic
ideals was far less remote in Scotland than in most other European
countries.
Among the anti-revolutionary intellectuals who had an axe to grind,
the influential group of French emigre writers deserve special attention.
Of these the Breton Vicomte de Chateaubriand showed remarkable
detachment. Already in his early Essai historique, politique , et moral sur
les Revolutions, published in 1797 during his exile in London, he
declared that the French Revolution had been inevitable. In his great
autobiography, the Memoires d'Outre Tombe, on which he first
embarked in 1809, the unbiased analysis of the main causes of the
Revolution is resumed. Aristocracy, we are told, passes through three
successive stages. At first there is the glorious age of superiority; this is
succeeded by the age of privilege during which the aristocracy de-
generates; finally, during the age of vanity, it dies out. Yet loss of
faith in the ruling classes of the decadent ancien regime did not mean
that he had much confidence in the people, that upstart sovereign of the
post-aristocratic age. In France where, after the July Revolution of
1830, the political centre of gravity seemed to have shifted further than
elsewhere, he lamented the complete disappearance of respect for
authority of any kind. ‘Nothing more exists,’ he complains in his
Memoirs, ‘authority of experience and age, birth or genius, talent or
virtue: all are denied, contested, and despised.’ What he saw around
him was ‘a world without consecrated authority’. In one thing the
romantics of every shade were agreed — their dislike of the rule of the
middle class.
The self-styled Comte de Rivarol, who spent the last nine years of his
life (1792-1801) in Brussels, London, Hamburg and finally in Berlin,
stood out as a shrewd observer of the revolutionary scene. Burke, who
had read Rivarol’s account of the early stages of the Revolution in the
Journal politique, called him the Tacitus of the French Revolution.
Like Burke, but independently, Rivarol was struck by the similarity
between the Revolution and earlier movements of religious reform.
Since 1789 political struggles, he noted, tended to turn into religious,
or quasi-religious, contests — and this in spite of the fact that the anti-
Christian character of the Revolution was manifest. The new revolu-
tionary political philosophy was taking over the function of a religion,
albeit of a purely secular character. Rivarol was of the opinion that
this was a highly dangerous phenomenon. He also perceived, as did his
fellow -emigre Mallet du Pan, that the new political fanaticism was even
more cruel than its religious counterpart had been. To combat the new
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ideas, gunfire was ineffective; it was new ideas that were needed.
He bemoaned the fact that the Allies, in their campaign against the
Revolution, were always in arrears ‘ by one year, by one army, and by one
idea’. Rivarol also observed that man was after all not so rational a
creature as the enlightened philosophers had tried to make out. Only
too frequently, it seemed to him, human beings were swayed by a non-
rational and even anti-rational quest for power. Political science would
have to find room for a theory of the human passions. Even the most
highly civilised nations were far less removed from barbarism than was
generally believed. For the mob the century of Enlightenment did not
exist and, moreover, would never come about. Rivarol was certainly
among the first to make a psychological study of mass behaviour.
Appalled by the atrocities of the Revolution, he reached the height of
his powers as a writer in his famous indictment of the Terror, 1 which
later made a deep impression on the literary critic Sainte-Beuve.
Rivarol also foresaw, as early as did Burke, that the Revolution
would one day be ended ‘by the sabre’, and that its heir was bound to
be a despot. His own preference was for a strong constitutional
monarchy. Some kind of social elite seemed to him to be indispensable,
but he was under no illusion about the nobility of his own time who, he
declared, were but the spectres of their ancestors. Rivarol was also
among the earliest champions of the conservative alliance between
throne and altar.
In the polemical writings of the dogmatic and intransigent Joseph de
Maistre religion and politics are inextricably interwoven. The French
invasion of his native land of Savoy had driven the former liberal into
exile in 1792. His conversion to an extreme anti-revolutionary attitude
was rapid, indeed his Considerations sur la France, published in
Neuchatel in 1796, soon became the bible of the emigres. Even more
strongly than Burke, de Maistre emphasised the social function of
religion. ‘The greatest crime a nobleman can commit is to attack the
Christian dogmas,’ he wrote in a letter to a friend. He argued as follows:
‘The patrician is a lay priest: religion is his paramount and most
sacred property, for it preserves his privilege which is lost together with
it.’ 2 Accordingly, the Revolution, in all its Satanic frightfulness,
appeared to de Maistre as God’s punishment for the impiety of the
French ruling class. When the sin had been atoned for, France would
again raise her head; with the monarchy, order and religion would be
restored. In some of its aspects de Maistre’s political thought appears
1 Discours preliminaire du Nouveau Dictionnaire de la Longue frangaise (Paris, 1797),
tome 1, pp. 231-5. The above estimate of Rivard’s originality was perhaps not shared
by contemporaries, but is evident to us in historical retrospect. Cf. Hans Barth, ‘Antoine
de Rivarol und die Franzosische Revolution’, in Schweizer Beitrage zur Allgemeinen
Geschichte, vol. xn (Bern, 1954).
’ Lettres et opuscules inidits (Paris, 1851), vol. n, pp. 262-3.
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to be theocratic, for he insists that the existence of the social order is the
result of divine decree. However, closer analysis reveals that in his eyes
the function of religion — to use Max Weber’s phrase — is the domestica-
tion of the lower classes. What de Maistre is most concerned with is the
necessity of order and subordination in the State. This is why all written
constitutions and in particular the modem parliamentary system are
roundly condemned by him, and why he insists that the ruling class
should always be separated from the people by birth or wealth, for,
once the people at large have lost the respect for authority, all govern-
ment, he fears, will come to an end.
Less radical and more traditionalist was the political thought of the
French emigre Vicomte de Bonald who returned and gave passive
support to the Empire, even accepting a position as a councillor of
Napoleon’s University. He attributed the anarchic tendencies of the
Revolution to the corroding power of the rationalist philosophers.
Bonald’s Theorie du pouvoir politique et religieux, published in Con-
stance in 1796, contains a fierce attack on the ideals of the Revolution,
especially those of political equality and the sovereignty of the people.
The state should and must always be divided into the three categories of
the sovereign, the ministry or nobility, and the subjects or the people.
He abhors the independent expression of individual thought, and
invests tradition with a halo glorifying the ideals of the past simply
on account of their antiquity. In the midst of the revolutionary turmoil
and its aftermath, he longs for stability, and finds it in the French society
of the seventeenth rather than the eighteenth century. Moreover, re-
jecting eighteenth-century optimism about human nature, Catholic
traditionalists like Bonald reverted to the Christian concept of original
sin. The contrast with revolutionary thought could hardly be more
glaring.
In German-speaking countries, and especially in Prussia, the counter-
revolutionary doctrines of the Swiss Karl Ludwig von Haller caused a
considerable stir. In essentials, they were contained already in his
Handbuch der allgemeinen Staatenlehre (1808). A fuller exposition of his
ideas is to be found in his main work, Restauration der Staatswissen-
schaft, published in Winterthur from 1816 onwards. It was from the
title of this book that the period 1814-30 came to be described as that
of the Restoration in Europe (though the period of Restoration in
England from 1660 to 1688 may also have served as a model). Haller,
a patrician of Berne, the social structure of which had been little affected
by the French Revolution, made feudal or corporate tradition the pivot
of his political thought. He was full of blind admiration for the Middle
Ages, although on his own admission he had never read a single work
on that epoch. Political power, provided it is exercised by long-
established monarchs or aristocracies or civic oligarchies, is sur-
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rounded by Haller with an aura of sanctity. He even goes so far as to
postulate a ‘natural law of the stronger’, an ominous idea reminiscent
of the sophist Callicles or, indeed, Hobbes, and presaging Nietzsche
and the social Darwinians. Even more markedly than Joseph de
Maistre, Haller used religion as an instrumentum regni. His con-
version to Catholicism (1820) seems to have been due mainly to
political motives.
Although conservative ideologies, often more subtle than Haller’s,
naturally thrived during the Restoration period in Europe, the same
era also witnessed the momentous rise of a second wave of revolu-
tionary fervour. Here Shelley deserves pride of place. To a man bom
in 1792 the Revolution was a tradition and not a personal experience.
Already at Eton Shelley rebelled against the school’s rituals. It was
then that he first came to read Godwin’s Inquiry Concerning Political
Justice which made a deep and lasting impact on his susceptible mind.
Queen Mab, an early work, in parts reads almost like a versification of
the philosopher’s prose. The mature poems too, such as The Revolt of
Islam and Prometheus Unbound, propagate Godwin’s ideas: per-
fectibility of the human race, egalitarianism, anarchism, and non-
resistance. Godwin’s violent anti-clericalism was revived in a pro-
vocative pamphlet on The Necessity of Atheism, composed by the young
firebrand during his undergraduate days at University College, Oxford,
and bringing them to an end by his expulsion. Since Shelley rejected
all organised religion, marriage meant nothing to him as a sacrament,
and, again in Godwin’s footsteps, he declared that the existing system
of marriage was hostile to human happiness. ‘A husband and wife’,
he writes in a note to Queen Mab, ‘ought to continue so long united
as they love each other: any law which should bind them to cohabita-
tion for one moment after the decay of their affection, would be an
intolerable tyranny and the most unworthy of toleration.’ In his own
tempestuous life Shelley acted accordingly. In France the novelist
George Sand was to profess and act on similar principles. Arguing for
legal methods of divorce, which had been introduced in 1792 but
abolished in 1816, ‘I can find but one remedy,’ she wrote in 1837 to
Lamennais, ‘for the barbarous injustice and endless misery of a hope-
lessly unhappy marriage. That remedy is the right to dissolve such a
marriage with liberty to marry again.’
Shelley made more than one excursion into contemporary politics.
Thus he travelled to Ireland to forward the cause of Repeal and Catholic
Emancipation, and worked out a scheme of parliamentary reform to be
submitted to a referendum. He also championed the cause of equal
rights for women. To Shelley, the aristocracy of his time were ‘the
drones of the community’ who ‘feed on the mechanics’ labour’. His
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abiding passion, a strong aversion to cruelty and tyranny, inspired the
bitter poem The Mask of Anarchy (1819). He had begun as the apostle
of reason. Later however he deviated from Godwin’s doctrinaire
rationalism, for he had now come to realise that ‘until the mind can
love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of
moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life’. 1
Shelley’s friend Lord Byron gained an even wider reputation as
standard-bearer of political radicalism. It is true that revolutionary
movements all over the world had his outspoken sympathy, and those
of Italy and Greece even his active support. Yet Byron felt no attach-
ment to democracy, which he once called ‘an aristocracy of black-
guards’. 2 Had the French Revolution not shown that mobs too could
turn oppressors? In the same vein he wrote to John Cam Hobhouse
in 1820: ‘Pray don’t mistake me: it is not against the pure principles of
reform that I protest, but against low, designing, dirty levellers who
would pioneer their way to a democratical tyranny.’ 3 Byron was
intensely proud of his noble origin, and it is hard to avoid the impression
that his hatred of oppressors exceeded his sympathy for the oppressed.
His radicalism may have been sharpened by the social ostracism that
clung to his name since the days of his separation from Lady Byron
(1816). Whatever the motives, Byron’s satirical poems certainly helped
to inflame revolutionary sentiments both in England and abroad,
particularly the last cantos of Don Juan, The Age of Bronze, and last
but not least The Vision of Judgment. His death in the cause of Greek
Independence inspired political idealists all over the world. It was in
Italy, Poland, Russia and the Balkans, as well as in the politically
minded Germany of Heinrich Heine and the Young Germany move-
ment, that Byron’s posthumous impact was felt most strongly. ‘The
day will come,’ Mazzini wrote in 1835, ‘when Democracy will remember
all that it owes to Byron.’
As for Byron’s Russian admirers and emulators, it is enough to
mention the name of Mikhail Lermontov, the only genuine and at the
same time significant Russian romantic. Like his great idol, Lermontov
too regarded himself as being in a state of war with the society that
surrounded him. For the stifling regime of Tsar Nicholas I and the
social strata that supported it he had nothing but contempt, shown
in his Ode on the Death of Pushkin (1837). Pushkin himself, whose early
poems were mentioned specifically at the trials of 1826 as having in-
fluenced some of the Decembrists, had made a strong appeal in The
Village (1819) for the abolition of serfdom. Both poets had to pay for
their audacity by being exiled from Moscow to the outlying provinces.
1 Preface to Prometheus Unbound (London, 1820).
2 Letters and Journals, ed. R. E. Prothero (London, 1898-1901), vol. v, pp. 405-6.
“ Correspondence, ed. John Murray (London, 1922), vol. n, p. 148.
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The generations born during the last third of the eighteenth century
witnessed also the early stages of the great Industrial Revolution that
was destined to transform the entire face of the earth. No wonder that
some contemporaries tended to look with alarm at changes whose
ultimate consequences are still hard to estimate. Often the romantics’
sense of beauty was offended by the hideousness of the districts in which
the new industry had arisen. In England, Southey in his Colloquies on
the Progress and Prospects of Society (1829), anticipated much of
Ruskin’s and William Morris’s later campaign against the deformity of
a mechanised world. The American writer George Ticknor, who in
1819 visited Newcastle-on-Tyne and its surroundings, thus described
his impressions: ‘At the appearance of every coal-pit a quantity of the
finer parts that are thrown out is perpetually burning, and the effect
produced by the earth, thus apparently everywhere on fire, both on the
machines used and the men busied with it, was horrible. It seemed as if
I were in Dante’s shadowy world.’ A journey through the Black Country
in the dead of night inspired the background of John Martin’s powerful
painting The Great Day of His Wrath ; he told his son that he could not
imagine anything more terrible even in the regions of everlasting
punishment. The romantics also recoiled from the growing artificiality
of urbanised life. Some, too, and notably Southey, feared that the balance
between agriculture and industry might one day be irrevocably upset.
Southey’s pseudonymous Letters from England (1807) contain some of
the earliest critical observations on the human aspect of the Industrial
Revolution. The conclusion is sweeping: ‘In commerce, even more than
in war, both men and beasts are considered mainly as machines, and
sacrificed with even less compunction.’ Coleridge, too, pondered much
about the interdependence between economic problems and those of a
social, moral and religious character. The teaching of the dominant
school of political economists repelled him because of their purely
economic approach to the problem of human labour. Thus he never
ceased to condemn the system which considered ‘men as things,
instruments, machines, property’. In The Friend (1809) he declared
explicitly: ‘The economists who are willing to sacrifice men to the
creation of national wealth (which is national only in statistical tables)
are forgetting that even for patriotic purposes no person should be
treated as a thing.’
Similar views were expressed by the Genevan historian and economist
Simonde de Sismondi. He too felt that the economists were abstracting
too much from reality, and he also pointed out that they tended to
view things essentially from the point of view of the producer instead of
that of society in general. As a counterblast to David Ricardo’s
Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), Sismondi gave to
his main work in this field the title Nouveaux principes d’economie
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politique, ou de la richesse dans ses rapports a\ec la population (1819).
Part of his polemic was directed against Adam Smith’s French disciple
Jean-Baptiste Say, who had categorically declared that any increase
in industrial productivity was bound to be beneficial, as every product
would find its consumer. In Sismondi’s view, this meant putting the
cart before the horse. His study of the post-Napoleonic crisis in
England, made during his visit to this country in 1818-19, had led him to
the conclusion that the root cause of the crisis lay in under-consumption
on the part of the working classes, whose purchasing power was
insufficient to absorb the increased industrial output. Similar crises, he
predicted, would recur unless the prevailing economic structure was
overhauled. Among his proposals for social reform were legislative acts
protecting the workers against unemployment and allowing them to
form unions for the purpose of resisting oppression. His concern about
the chaotic phase of the Industrial Revolution is epitomised in his
warning that the interest of humanity should not be sacrificed to ‘the
simultaneous action of all industrial cupidities’. In short, ‘the rich
must be protected against their own greed.’
The three last-mentioned thinkers — Southey, Coleridge and Sismondi
— to whom the Bavarian Franz von Baader might be added — clearly
anticipated one of Karl Marx’s fundamental indictments of capitalism,
namely that it transformed human beings into things. It is therefore not
surprising to learn from the posthumously published papers of Marx
that in his youth he had been strongly influenced by romantic ideas.
Yet the romantics were also protesting against the spirit of materialism
and eudaemonism which was to penetrate Marxism. Moreover,
Sismondi, though he advocated far-reaching social legislation, was as
much opposed to socialism as he was to capitalism, because both systems
appeared to him to be centralisers and, for that reason, oppressive.
It was only after 1815 that the ideas of the eccentric social reformer
Charles Fourier began to attract much attention even in France.
Although himself anything but a romantic, Fourier, too, was deeply
alarmed by some features of the Industrial Revolution. Disliking
centralisation and large-scale production, he strongly deplored the fact
that the new industrial age must constitute a threat to smaller enter-
prises. His ideal, based on an agrarian handicraft economy, was in
many ways retrospective, but he had some fresh and forward-looking
ideas, such as the need to render labour as attractive and joyous as
possible. More outspokenly than any previous thinker he fastened upon
the waste involved in a competitive organisation and opposed to it his
own peculiar conception of a so-called phalanstere, a community com-
posed of about 1600 persons on some 5000 acres of land. Fourier
resembled Godwin not only in his ardent rationalism, but also in his
marked contempt for the institution of marriage, that bugbear of so
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many reformers. He also shared with Godwin and Condorcet the
confident hope in the physical perfectibility of man and a spectacular
extension of the span of human life, venturing a specific forecast — an
average of 144 years.
In Britain, Robert Owen had the unusual distinction of being in a
position both to preach and to practise social reform. A Welshman by
birth, Owen worked for several years in Manchester where he became
thoroughly acquainted with the seamy side of the factory system. Soon
after becoming manager and part-owner of the textile mills of New
Lanark in Scotland, he began to transform that enterprise in a truly
unprecedented manner. In the teeth of stubborn opposition from his
partners, he increased the workers’ wages and reduced the working
day in the factory from 16 to 10 \ hours. Child labour under the age of
ten was abolished, and all children living in the village received free
education from the age of five. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars,
New Lanark had become a model establishment, at any rate by con-
temporary standards. Owen next proceeded to press for a more
general improvement of industrial conditions. In A New View of
Society (1813) he contrasted, as Southey had done before him, the
care given by the superintendents of factories to the inanimate machines
with their neglect of the animate ones; and in an appeal To the British
Master Manufacturers (1818) he strongly underlined the baneful effects
of the premature employment of children. Some but by no means all
of Owen’s proposals became incorporated in Peel’s Act of 1819, the
first effective Factory Act. It was at about this time that Owen began to
mobilise public opinion abroad. He invited foreign statesmen to
inspect New Lanark, and established further contacts when he visited
the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle and submitted Two Memorials on
Behalf of the Working Class. There too he met the now ultra-con-
servative Friedrich von Gentz, whose reaction to Owen’s schemes was
cynical: ‘We do not want the mass to become wealthy and independent
of us. How could we govern them if they were?’ 1
Dissatisfied with the somewhat meagre success of his campaign,
Owen in 1825 left the Old World for the New. His fame had preceded
him, for a few years previously a Society for Promoting Communities
based on his principles had been started in New York. Owen now
bought the village of Harmony in Indiana from the Rappites who, like
several other religious communities, had conducted their settlement
along communist lines. The idea of Owen’s settlement, renamed
New Harmony, differed from that of its predecessor, in that ‘it aimed
at teaching the whole world a new way of fife rather than at the with-
drawal of a chosen few from the contamination of human wickedness’
(G. D. H. Cole). No such aim was fulfilled: whereas the Rappites had
1 The Life of Robert Owen. Written by himself (London, 1857), vol. 1, p. 183.
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apparently lived a frugal but contented existence, New Harmony was
from the start beset with inner dissensions which were in part due to the
haphazard composition of its members. Faced with the collapse of the
settlement, which cost him four-fifths of his fortune, Owen concluded
that men could not be fitted to five in community save by previous moral
training. After his return to England in 1828, he took for a time a
leading part in the Trade Union movement. The mainspring of his
reformatory zeal lay in his unflinching humanitarianism. He rejected
all established religion and denounced the Christian Churches, although
he admitted that the seventeenth-century Quaker John Bellers had
anticipated some of his ideas. 1 Believing as he did that the formation of
man’s character was due entirely to outward social influences, Owen
felt unable to accept the Christian view that moral responsibility attaches
to each human individual. For the most part of his life he remained a
staunch rationalist, until at the end a long repressed urge for the
supernatural made him a convert to spiritualism.
Claude Henri, Comte de Saint-Simon, one of the most original if
also most eccentric thinkers of his time, enthusiastically welcomed the
dawn of the Industrial Age, even declaring that the whole of history
had been heading towards this consummation. Though himself the
scion of a famous noble family he apostasised as it were from his class
by giving up his title during the Revolution and then by including the
nobility in the ‘idle classes’ who in his opinion deserved to be thrown off.
These included also the officer class, despite the fact that in his youth
Saint-Simon himself had fought bravely in the American War of
Independence. The class that mattered most in his eyes was that of the
industriels whom he thus defined: ‘all those who labour to produce, or
place within the reach of the members of society, one or several means of
satisfying their needs or their physical tastes.’ This definition comprised
the three categories of agriculturalists, manufacturers and merchants.
He proposed not only that the Chamber of Deputies should contain a
larger proportion of industriels, but also that members of that class,
aided by expert advice, should plan public affairs and projects of public
works on a grand scale. He further suggested that the executive be
composed of bankers. As for the conception of the new system as a
whole, that should be entrusted to a single head, a suggestion that
savours of Enlightened Despotism but has also a sinister modern ring
of totalitarianism about it. Indeed, Saint-Simon was fully prepared to
jettison the ideal of individual liberty which ‘would eminently tend to
hamper the action of the mass over the individuals’. Time and again he
opposed to the ‘critical, destructive and revolutionary’ eighteenth
1 Proposals for raising a College of Industry of all useful Trades and Husbandry with
Profit for the Rich, a Plenty ful Living for the Poor and a Good Education for Youth (London,
1696).
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LITERATURE AND THOUGHT
century his vision of the nineteenth as marked by ‘organisation,
cohesion and integration’. It was not surprising that he repudiated the
idea of popular sovereignty. In a characteristic effort to sweeten the
authoritarian pill, Saint-Simon tried to convince himself and his
followers that under the new industrial system the function of govern-
ment would no longer consist in the objectionable rule of men over men,
but instead in the administration of things in response to the needs of
any given situation. A similar illusion was to lead Frederick Engels to
envisage ‘the withering away of the State’.
The prospect of the social millennium, lately expected to be the fruit
of the French Revolution, was now linked to the Industrial Revolution
(if a term not then invented may be used). Previously republic and
peace had as it were been identified. Now Saint-Simon trusted that,
under the new dispensation, the administrative and industrial system
would automatically be pacific. In retrospect the political revolution of
1789 still appeared as a turning point of great significance, but it had to
be completed by a scientific revolution of comparable dimensions.
Apart from physics, Saint-Simon attached the greatest importance to that
new branch of science to which his famous disciple Auguste Comte was
to give the name of sociology. Unlike some later idolaters of science,
Saint-Simon was by no means blind to the spiritual malaise of his time,
but in his view a return to any of the old established religions was
impracticable, mainly for the reason that the clergy, since the sixteenth
century, had not kept abreast of the scientific spirit of the age. Nor was
he altogether uncritical of the men of science, who had been too readily
harnessed to Napoleon’s military despotism. Yet he was confident that
scientists and scholars could be entrusted with the intellectual and even
the spiritual leadership for the society of the future. A so-called Council
of Newton was to function as the central authority for this purpose.
In his earlier writings Saint-Simon had not paid much attention to the
harmful effects of the Industrial Revolution, but the grave and wide-
spread crisis of 1817 and his study of industrial conditions both in
England and France made him realise the urgency of that problem.
His diagnosis presages that of Karl Marx: ‘The workers,’ he wrote,
‘see themselves deprived of the enjoyment of their labour, which is the
aim of their labour.’ The first priority therefore must be to improve
the lot of the working class. Indeed, Saint-Simon put forward the
strikingly modern idea that society should be organised for the pro-
motion of the well-being of the most numerous and poorest class; this
carried him far beyond his earlier insistence on equality of opportunity
and the suppression of hereditary privileges. The new doctrine forms
the essence of his last work. Nouveau Christianisme, written shortly
before his death in 1825. It suddenly struck him that his ambitious
scheme of social reform could be justified on the basis of Christian ethics.
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Without subscribing to that system as a whole, or to other aspects of the
Christian doctrine which, indeed, he regarded as outmoded, he was
still impressed by Christ’s injunction that human beings should behave
to each other as brothers. Thus Christian charity, shorn indeed of so
essential an element as man’s love for God, came to be linked to a
purely secular religion.
Soon after Saint-Simon’s death, some of his disciples issued a
statement entitled La Doctrine saint-simonienne (1828), in which the
Master’s ideas were expounded systematically and new ideas added.
This stressed the importance of work for all, or full employment as it
was called later, and advocated ambitious projects of public works,
such as the cutting of canals at Suez and Panama and the development
of a world-wide network of railways. It was a particularly modern
touch that these schemes were designed to unify the entire globe. In
order to carry them through it was proposed that gigantic industrial
companies be established. If the doctrine thus included some unmis-
takable features of a highly developed capitalism, it also anticipated
some socialist postulates, such as the abolition of inheritance, on the
basis of the motto ‘To each according to his needs, from each according
to his capacities’. This and other distinctively socialist ideas came to be
included under the influence of the editor of the statement, Saint-
Amand Bazard, who had previously been connected with the secret
society of the Carbonari. Later on, Pierre Leroux became the ideologist
of the left-wing Saint-Simonians. Not long after its inauguration, the
movement — often in a grotesque manner — assumed the outward
trappings of a Church, with Bazard and Barthelemy-Prosper Enfantin
as its spiritual leaders. After the inevitable schism, the bizarre Enfantin
remained in sole charge. The Saint-Simonian religion, as it came to be
called, attracted many followers, among them a striking number of
Jews, notably Saint-Simon’s favourite disciple Olinde Rodrigues who
many years later edited the Master’s complete works, and the brothers
Emile and Isaac Pereire who during the Second Empire were to dis-
tinguish themselves in the world of banking. It was largely the
Messianic flavour of Saint-Simonianism that appealed to some newly
emancipated Jews. 1 While clinging to that part of their inherited
tradition, they had travelled so far from the religion of their ancestors
that they could take Saint-Simon for their Messiah. The attitude of the
Gentile followers of the sect was perhaps no less astonishing, for here
were lapsed Christians whose religious yearnings found fulfilment, or so
it seemed, in Saint-Simon’s testament Nouveau Christianisme.
If Saint-Simon points in one direction to Comte’s positivism, in
another he and the two social reformers previously mentioned may be
linked to the next generation by quoting the tribute paid by Frederick
1 J. L. Talmon, Political Messianism. The Romantic Phase (London, i960), pp. 80-1.
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LITERATURE AND THOUGHT
Engels to the men whom he regarded as his own and Karl Marx’s
precursors: ‘German socialism,’ he wrote, ‘will never forget that it
rests on the shoulders of Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen — three
men who, however fantastic and Utopian their teachings, belonged
to the great minds of all times and by the intuition of genius anticipated
an incalculable number of truths which we now demonstrate scienti-
fically.’ 1
In the history of political and social thought, the period from 1789
to 1848 constitutes an entire whole. In France, above all, the February
Revolution marks the close of an epoch, whose beginning and end are
linked midway by the Italian-born Buonarroti’s account (1828) of
Babeuf’s Conspiration pour Vegalite of 1796. Buonarroti, who had
himself taken part in the conspiracy, helped to surround Babouvisme,
as it came to be called, with a kind of mythical aura. His foremost
disciple, Auguste Blanqui, was the eternal conspirator, and spent fully
thirty-three of his seventy-six years in prison. A ‘leading lady’ in the
revolutionary drama was Flora Tristan, the daughter of a Peruvian-
Spanish father and a French mother, who was the first to conceive the
idea of a workers’ international union, described in the year before her
death in her book Union Ouvriere (1843).
Among the more pacific advocates of social reform, fitienne Cabet
and Louis Blanc deserve special mention. The former, influenced by
Thomas More’s Utopia no less than by the ideas of Babeuf, described,
in his pseudonymous Voyage en Icarie (1839) a communistic Utopia
in which the State exercises absolute control over all essential activities.
All property is abolished and complete uniformity of dress is enforced
as one of the symbols of equality. The indoctrination of the citizens is
carried on from the cradle to the grave. Like Owen, Cabet too experi-
mented with his ideas in America, where the Icarian settlement in
Nauvoo, Illinois, eventually met with the same fate as Owen’s New
Harmony. Louis Blanc, son of a French emigre and of a Spanish
mother, sprang into fame by his Organisation du Travail (1839). Unlike
most of the socialists, he shared the belief of the radical democrats that
universal suffrage, once achieved, would become an instrument of
social progress. The idea of a powerful and benevolent State strongly
appealed to him, for he believed that socialism could not be first
established in any other way, though co-operation would then replace
competition by its own greater efficiency.
It was precisely the role which Cabet and Blanc respectively assigned
to the State in the transformation of society that was repugnant to the
mind of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Almost alone among the social
reformers of his time, that great anarchist revived the worship of Liberty
which many of his fellow reformers had been ready to sacrifice on the
1 Supplementary Preface for the 3rd edn. of Der Deutsche Bauernkrieg (Leipzig, 1875).
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altar of Equality. Again Proudhon was almost the only social reformer
of genuinely plebeian origin. This fact helps to explain the marked
distrust he felt towards socialist intellectuals who did not originate
from the common people. Any discussion of his thought and influence
belongs outside this volume.
In the later stages of his tortuous intellectual career, that truly Protean
character, the Abbe de La Mennais, also inveighed against the
authoritarian schemes of many reformers and revolutionaries. More-
over he differed from them, not only by giving (like Mazzini) as much
emphasis to man’s duties as to his rights, but above all in his conviction
that egalitarian views can only be defended on the basis of the idea of
God as the common Father. For him (though not for Mazzini) the ideal
of human equality was derived from Christianity and had no future
without it. Through the vicissitudes of his career he clung to the belief
that a Christian foundation was indispensable for the task of social
reconstruction. Already in 1817, in his Essai sur V Indifference en
Matiere de Religion , that had been his chief argument in favour of a
return to Christianity, which he commended principally as a means of
regenerating French and, indeed, European society. La Mennais was
not entirely alone in his bold attempt at reconciling revolutionary ideas
with Christianity. Buchez, the founder of the co-operative movement
in France, and later Constantin Pecqueur, were working in the same
direction; and in Bohemia, the Catholic philosopher Bernard Bolzano
in 1831 composed a social Utopia, Von dem besten Staat, which was not
published until several decades after his death. None, however, wrote
with the same millenarian fervour as did La Mennais. His Paroles d'un
Croyant (1834), where radical social ideas were couched in biblical
language, went through eight editions in less than a year. Pope
Gregory XVI condemned the book in his encyclical Singulari nos, and
there can be no doubt that the Vatican had discovered serious flaws
in the Abbe’s theological armour. Nevertheless, La Mennais was not
wrong in suspecting that the Pope had yielded to strong pressure from
Tsar Nicholas I, and also from Prince Mettemich who even, it seems,
influenced the very wording of the encyclical. 1
Deeply mortified in his pride, La Mennais reacted with an astonishing
volte-face : he discarded the Church, and Christianity in general, and
took refuge in a vague blend of deism, pantheism, and idolatry of ‘the
People’. Henceforth he signed his name ‘Lamennais’, thus repudiating
any aristocratic connections. For many years he had acted as the herald
of a Christian revival; now the same man became one of the protagonists
1 Cf. A. Boudou, Le Saint-Siege et la Russie, 1814-47, 2 vols. (Paris, 1922-5); Liselotte
Ahrens, Lamennais und Deutschland (Munster, 1930); and Andreas Posch, ‘Lamennais und
Mettemich’, in Mitteilungen des Instituts fiir osterreichische Geschichtsforschung (Vienna,
1954 )-
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of a deistic humanism. La Mennais’s instability was reflected also in his
frequent change of profession. He had started as a teacher, had then
somewhat reluctantly assumed the priesthood, next he had acquired
European renown as the author of profound politico-religious works,
afterwards he had become a journalist and now, in the late 1830’s,
ended as a political pamphleteer. The brilliance which distinguished
his writing still shone in his treatise De Vesclavage moderne (1839), in
which he drew a striking picture of the antagonism between capitalists
and proletarians. Marx and Engels were most probably influenced
by that work when, eight years later, they drew up their epoch-making
Communist Manifesto. Altogether, Lamennais’s immediate impact
was more radical than his social thought; and, although he was a
gradualist who believed in the suffrage rather than in revolution, he
came to sit, in 1848, with the extreme Left on the Mountain of the
National Assembly. Long after his death (1854), many of his ideas
were revived in the political programme of Christian Socialist parties
in several European countries. The posthumous controversy over this
daring, if erratic, thinker has continued for well over a century.
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CHAPTER V
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
I N the generation between the Revolutions of 1793 and 1830, the
community of science and technology outgrew the posture of the
Enlightenment and assumed the stance of the nineteenth century.
The old rationale of Condillac and the associationist psychology de-
veloped into that of Comte and positivism, which would know in order
to predict and predict in order to control. Condorcet, last of the
philosophes, left the testament of the eighteenth century to appear in
1795 after his death — Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of
the Human Mind. In that moving little book, science figures as the
bearer of progress. It is the instrument which educates the human
understanding in the order of nature. But the revolutionary generation
was more messianic than naturalistic, and it transmuted this benign
educational mission into something closer to engineering — civil engi-
neering, social engineering, and perhaps the engineering of humanity
itself. The Encyclopedists had already prided themselves on freeing
science from metaphysics. Now the positivists would consummate the
emancipation by liberating science even from ontology and, indeed,
from every pretence to lay hold on a reality beyond observation, experi-
ence and act. Comte wished to abandon absolute in favour of relative
statements. And for this reason, he looked to human history rather
than to some outer reality as the repository of experience. In his
philosophy, rationalism turned attention to historical thinking, which
had hitherto been the resort of romantics hostile to exact science. Man
in history replaced matter in motion as the natural process par excellence,
and science, rising in history, served it also as dynamic motor, the factor
which made all the difference between one age and another, and which,
graduating into knowledge of its own methods, held the promise of
regeneration.
What thus transformed the expectations held of science was the
extreme politicisation wrought by the Revolution in all aspects of
culture. Positivism in scientific thinking was a proper creation of the
Revolution, not of this or that faction or party, but rather of its con-
sciousness and action, whether directed left or right. It was the
philosophy of that thrust which Revolution and Empire made in com-
mon. In a generation which would make over the world in the interests
of talent, science would fulfil itself in sociology applied. Nor did the
new cast appear in words alone. It formed institutions. It styled and
ordered the sciences themselves (though not their findings, which could
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only be about nature). It brought the Baconian dream to within one
step of realisation, the old democratic dream of a common man’s
technology ennobled by science and nourishing it with problems.
Cultural leadership still was French. But not for long — virtue was
at last going out of France after 1815. The pattern of French in-
stitutions and the impulse of French teaching would outlast the vigour
of French science in the nineteenth century. For scientific affairs also
may be illuminated by Tocqueville’s perception of the Revolution as the
culmination of civic tendencies in the old regime — an explosion inward
down to the Year II, and thereafter outward. Napoleon is sometimes
represented as an enlightened despot. The epithet takes on flesh when
one reflects that the persons who actually administered the affairs of
science and learning had been formed in the school of Turgot, minister-
philosophe of the expiring monarchy, whose projects pre-figured the
revolutionary reform of science (as of much else). In the 1790’s the
influential schemes for education — notably Talleyrand’s and Con-
dorcet’s — contemplated constructing a national system around a core of
science. Citizens at once handy and virtuous would be trained up in
science and useful skills, and the Academy of Sciences would graduate
from the role of privileged and honorific corporation into that of
collective headmaster to all France, the scholarly apex of the nation.
Plans for an orderly institutionalisation of science failed when the
Academy instead paid the price of the elements of privilege and in-
tellectual aristocracy in its corporate personality. On 8 August 1793
the Convention abolished all academies as incompatible with a Republic.
The scientific community ceased to exist during the Terror. Its members
went into war-work or retreat, and in either case away from science.
Indeed, the scientific and intellectual history of the Revolution is bound
to put a value upon its phases different from that of political or military
history. In the opinion of the intellectuals of the 1790’s, the creative
period of the Revolution began, not with the Bastille, nor with the night
of 4 August, nor with the October days, nor with the exaltations of the
Year II — all that they saw as anarchy tempered by one last burst of
fanaticism — but with the fall of Robespierre and the preparation of the
moderate, the politically despised Directory.
The great creation of the intellectuals — the ideologues — was the
Institut national de France. A revival of the academies in republican
guise, the Institute carried over into the new order that responsibility
of the state for patronage of science, arts and letters, which, con-
ceived as embellishments due to a great monarchy under Louis XIV,
were now become handmaids of civic welfare. The existence of the
Institute was prescribed by the Constitution of the Year III. Its
regime was regulated by the law governing public education. Thus
would science and learning serve under two masters, a co-operative
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body to which election meant arrival in an elite, and an educational
system bound to become a department of state. Internal dispositions
reflected the altering scale of values. There was no replacement for the
Academie frangaise, formerly (and again after the Restoration) the
supreme embodiment of French cultural distinction. Instead, the
Institute consisted of three ‘classes’, science coming first in precedence
with sixty resident members, moral and political science second with
thirty-six, and literature and fine arts third with forty-eight. Each class
was subdivided into sections according to disciplines — mathematics,
mechanics, astronomy, etc. The Institute opened in a ceremonial
meeting at the Louvre in the Salle des Cariatides on 4 April 1796.
Thereafter, the First Class resumed the functions of the old Academy:
to serve the scientific community as a Mecca for ambition and the
guardian of standards, and the state as high court of technical resort.
The annual volumes of Memoires continued the great academic series
of the old regime, the repository together with the Philosophical Trans-
actions of the finest fruits of research into nature. Already, however,
the honorific was the more functional of the two aspects. Specialisa-
tion would draw the sciences apart rather than together in the nine-
teenth century, and the proliferation of societies and journals peculiar
to each was already out-stripping the capacity of any institution to
epitomise the work of all.
Nevertheless, the Encyclopedic ideology flowered in the Institute.
It is a pity that the word ‘ideology’ has come to signify the intellectual
content of some (discreditable?) political cause. To the original
‘ ideologues' — Destutt de Tracy, Cabanis, Volney, Dupont de Nemours
— the word meant rather right psychology, knowledge of how we come
by ideas, which in their view was by way of sensation. Their starting
point was Condillac’s philosophy of science, according to which man is
what he makes of his experience. If so, then the way to improve him is
to give him a better one. They would form political and social sciences
on this empiricism, and achieve the scientific idea of progress in the
politics of liberalism. They have not, it is true, won a commanding
place in the history of ideas or philosophy. They have been judged, per-
haps, by their words and not by their works. But they were the men
who drew the plans for the Institute — a ‘living Encyclopedia’ Daunou
called it — and in them the scientific inspiration of the enlightened view
of man passed over into political liberalism.
Indeed, the touch of ideologic reached far below the peak, revivifying
the whole body of science and channelling its life into educational forms.
In 1795 France had seen many educational schemes, but no schools,
since the suppression of religious foundations four years before. The
law of 25 October 1795, which founded the Institute at the summit, had
as its main objective a system of universal education. An Ecole centrale
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would furnish secondary education in each department. These schools,
forerunners of lycee and Gymnasium alike, actually began work under
the Directory. Science was the staple, taught, not for some moral
value (as the ideologues had fondly hoped), but simply for its practical
importance in the affairs of a modern nation, busy with conquest,
commerce and industry, and rife with opportunity. Design, mathe-
matics, physics and chemistry, natural history — those were the favourite
subjects, and that the order of demand.
That order was determined by the prospect of careers, which lay
through the professional schools. In higher education, the Directory
followed eclectic and pragmatic principles, adapting what had proved
itself in the old regime to the technical necessities of the new. The
Observatoire de Paris was retrieved from the revolutionaries and
restored to the astronomers. A new Bureau des Longitudes took over
responsibility for the astronomical almanac, the Connaissance du temps.
The ancient College de France alone had gone through the Revolution
untouched, its prestige enhanced by its hospitality to science. Two use-
ful and much less theoretical institutions were revived, the Ecole des
mines and the Ecole des ponts et chaussees. The Conservatoire des arts
et metiers housed objects of technical value expropriated from enemies
of the people. It built around this nucleus the first national museum of
science and technology, and offered technical courses for tradespeople
and artisans. New medical faculties were erected upon the corpses of
the old Universities of Paris, Strasbourg and Montpellier. The
Museum d'histoire naturelle, formerly the Jardin du Roi, emerged
flourishing from the Terror, its regime nationalised, rationalised, and
actually favoured by the Rousseauist preference for the humble, the
seemingly more democratic sciences of field and flower, bird and beast.
Finally, the expiring Convention authorised the two nurseries of the
intellectual elite of nineteenth-century France, the future Ecole normale
superieure and the Ecole poly technique. The former proved abortive
in its earliest effort to be born. Provision for training teachers must
obviously accompany a system of schools, but the Ecole normale of the
Year III was conceived in too generous a fit of enthusiasm. Nearly 1400
pupils from all France crowded into 700 places in the auditorium of the
Museum, ranging in qualifications from near illiteracy to the virtuosity
of the young physicist, Fourier. All were to become teachers in a four-
month course. It could not work. The opening of a normal school
restricted to setting standards had to await 1812 and Napoleonic con-
solidation. What is more significant than this setback was the faculty
assembled — Laplace and Lagrange, Berthollet and Monge — the great
names, in short, of French scientific leadership.
Temporary failure did not undo the commitment of scientists to
education, though it did separate them institutionally from the
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ideologues, who would have staffed the courses in moral and political
philosophy, and who, thereafter, what with their humane and psy-
chological bent, gathered round the School of Medicine. The physical
scientists, for their part, found full scope in the earliest, and always one
of the most exacting, institutes of technology, the Ecole polytechnique,
first called Ecole des travaux publics. That famous school, the nursery
of all engineering science, opened for classes on 21 December 1794.
It succeeded immediately because it was founded on two solid blocks of
pedagogical experience. First, there was a democratic element in the
‘revolutionary courses’ devised for the levee en masse. Second, there
was a professional element, drawn from the former school of military
engineering at Mezieres. In the military emergency of 1793, the regime
had looked to scientists for leadership in war production. It had not
looked in vain. For the first time, a scientific community mobilised to
serve the nation in arms. Supply, ordnance, communications, gun-
powder — France became a national workshop serving her armies.
And though the technical problems were of no theoretical interest,
theoretical scientists proved the best persons to see through and solve
them. In particular, the supply of salt-petre for gunpowder required
instructing masses of people in a new and simple technique of extraction.
The guiding hand in the whole war effort was Lazare Carnot’s. The
guiding spirit in technology was Gaspard Monge. The one was a
graduate of Mezieres, and the other his former teacher. Both had
endured the slights which the old regime knew how to visit on mere
ability, and both burned to vindicate, or rather to secure, professional
dignity to technicians, men who know and do something, as against
men who simply are something.
Thus did Polytechnique become one channel by which the great sea
of bourgeois grievance and idealism broke through into passionate
practice, a rivulet in the perspective of the Revolution as a whole,
perhaps, but the main stream for conveying scientific culture through
great events into the nineteenth century. The school long bore the
marks of its origin. Its regime was paramilitary. The numbers were
manageable, 392 pupils at the outset, an elite chosen by competitive
examination. The course required four years of intensive application.
Here for the first time, students went through a systematic scientific
and mathematical curriculum, directed toward practice to be sure, but
under the foremost scientific minds, all formed in the rigorous tradi-
tion which implants in the French intelligentsia something of the
Cartesian spirit, something of its mathematical imperative toward
order, unity, and elegance in doctrine. The students were able and eager.
They lived their days at Polytechnique exhilarated by the sense of being
conducted to the very forefront of scientific conquest, and there told
that the future of mankind, of the Republic, and not least of themselves
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depended on how they performed in so exposed a situation. And they
responded. Among the early graduating classes will be found many
names attached to the fundamental quantities and analytical devices in
nineteenth-century science — Cauchy, Coriolis, Poncelet, Poisson, Gay-
Lussac, Sadi Carnot, Fresnel. Among them, too, were young, dream-
ing engineers, who would soar in imagination with Saint-Simon far
beyond technology to technocracy, beyond public works to public
regeneration, and who would in fact construct railways and canals,
among them Suez. And in the class of 1814 was Auguste Comte, who
founded in positivism the most influential modem philosophy of
science and thus reduced the spirit of this institution to system.
Polytechnique and the other schools had an equal influence upon the
teachers. The attention of the historian of science is arrested by the
great clustering of systematic treatises in the first decades of the new
century. The explanation is that scientists were communicating, not
for the moment with their colleagues, but with their students. They
published their courses — Lagrange his theory of analytical functions,
Monge his descriptive geometry, Laplace his essay on probabilities,
Cuvier his comparative anatomy, Lamarck his zoological philosophy.
And parallel to this movement of rationalisation and generalisation in
the literature, the necessity to reorganise for teaching made science
into the profession it has become, a profession bottomed in educational
institutions and in return imparting to them the norms which make for
research and discovery. Scientists, in short, became professors. It is
difficult to exaggerate the importance of this seemingly so natural
development, which was a special case of the professionalisation of
function in the Revolution as a whole. For until then, science had been
simply an avocation, like literature or philosophy, dependent on the
wealth or favour of patrons, private or public.
Thus, France endowed herself almost at a stroke with a modem
set of scientific institutions. Their educational form, and the quality
of the men who taught and studied there, made her the scientific
schoolmistress of Europe. It may be that extreme centralisation, basing
higher learning upon a city rather than a nation, is what ultimately cost
her the scientific leadership which was indisputably hers through the
first third of the century. For the French way was to train an elite
rather than a people, quality rather than quantity. It may be, too, that
the very involvement of scientific education with Paris and the re-
volutionary heritage lost to French science the talents of the bourgeoisie
once that class turned safe and defensive. The mood of science is to
dare, and that was no longer the mood of bourgeois France.
But if these were flaws, they were hidden in the brilliance of the light
from Paris. In Weimar on 2 August 1830, Soret paid a call on Goethe.
Had he heard the news from Paris? cried the ageing sage: ‘Well, and
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what do you think of this great event? The volcano has exploded.’ 1
Nor did he mean the Revolution of July, but the open rupture in the
Academy of Sciences (again its name since the Restoration) between
Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire over fixity versus metamorphosis of
species. When in 1804 Alexander von Humboldt returned from four
years amid the jungles and upon the mountains of Latin America, it
was to Paris that he hurried with his collections and his specimens,
gathered during this, the pioneering geographical, botanical and
anthropological exploration of the nineteenth century, that second age
of great voyages. There he disposed his findings under the eyes of the
Institute, ranged them among the collections of the Museum, and
compared them with the resources brought thither by the cultural
raiders attached to the republican armies as representatives on mission
to the museums of the Low Countries, Germany, and Italy. In 1801
Alessandro Volta and his assistant, Brugnatelli, were ‘called to France’
(such was the language of the Institute) to evoke the electric current
from a Voltaic pile, ancestor of all batteries. On 15, 21 and 25 October,
Volta demonstrated the essential experiments before the First Class.
Laplace observed every particular, with utmost narrowness. On
7 November Volta began reading his famous memoir, ‘On the Identity
of the Electrical Fluid with the Galvanic Fluid’ — i.e. current and
static electricity. This time the first consul himself attended. It was his
right as a member since 1797 in the section of mechanics. Nor did this
august presence fail in attendance at two further sessions which Volta
required to get through his memoir, after which Napoleon himself
moved the award of a golden medal, and the creation of a prize for
further discoveries with this new phenomenon. In 1807 Humphry Davy
won the prize for his isolation by electrolysis of the alkaline metals,
sodium and potassium, and in 1813 received a safe conduct to cross to
Paris for his day of glory before the Institute.
‘All men of genius,’ so ran General Bonaparte’s decree of 19 May
1796, authorising transfer (among other things) of certain Leonardo
manuscripts from Milan to Paris, ‘all who have won distinction in the
republic of letters are French, whatever be the country which has
given them birth.’ 2 But it was rather a republic of science than letters
of which Napoleon would make Paris the forum, fulfilling in the realm
of culture her role as capital of Europe. Indeed, the Napoleonic varia-
tion on enlightened despotism would supplant philosophe by scientist.
Letters fell into limbo, or into exile, insofar as the man of letters would
be politique-et-moraliste in the fashion honoured both before and since
in France. Napoleon started that contempt for the ideologues in which,
1 Johann Eckermann, Gesprache mit Goethe, ed. H. H. Houben (Leipzig, 1925), p. 596.
’ Quoted in Edward MacCurdy, ed.. The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (New York,
1955). p. 46-
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for all their liberal aspirations, their reputation has languished. In 1803,
he suppressed the group by reorganising the Second Class out of
the Institute they had founded. Thereafter (as beforehand), he chose
his intellectual courtiers from among the scientists. Berthollet and
Monge were favourites. From organising victory, Carnot went back
to creative mathematics for a time, but was minister of the interior
during the Hundred Days. Laplace served briefly as minister of the
interior, and then honorifically as president of the Senate. Later,
Chaptal was minister of the interior, and Cuvier minister of education.
Fourcroy had a post as inspector of education. Joseph Fourier and
Ramond were departmental prefects. Expert and non-political, the
behaviour of the scientific community exemplifies a remark made by
Andre Malraux, pointing out that an effective regime by definition finds
its technicians. In the afterglow of Empire, the Academy of Sciences
continued to dominate the European scene until the Napoleonic genera-
tion wore out. The Restoration brought no interruption in the dual
principate under which it had flourished since the Consulate. Laplace
and Cuvier remained the lawgivers until their deaths in 1827 and 1832,
new men with new titles, the mathematical marquis and the biological
baron — indeed Louis XVIII, not Napoleon, issued their patents of
nobility.
Those were the twin stars of the first magnitude; nor was their
attraction, or that of the entire constellation, political. It was educa-
tional and institutional. In 1823, Adolphe Quetelet, the founder of
statistics as an analytical rather than simply a descriptive science, came
to Paris to qualify himself for a post at the Observatory of Brussels.
He found himself more interested in Lacroix’s course in probability
than in celestial mechanics, and he returned to make his observatory the
centre of statistical rather than astronomical science. Young German
chemists, impatient for the last word, divided their studies between
Berzelius in Sweden and Gay-Lussac in Paris, and bore off to their own
universities the leadership of nineteenth-century chemistry. Their
successors would not need to travel. The pattern of Polytechnique may
be followed across Germany in the foundation of Technische Hochs-
chulen: Prague in 1806, Vienna in 1815, Karlsruhe in 1825, Munich in
1827, Dresden in 1828, Stuttgart in 1829 and Hanover in 1831.
In the ordinary doings of scientists, and of other men beyond the
Anglo-American island of avoirdupois, the metric system remains the
most positive legacy of the French Revolution. The decision to base the
metre in nature, one ten-millionth part of the quadrant of a meridian
to be surveyed from Dunkirk to Barcelona, belonged to the naturalistic
universalism of the early Revolution. By 1799 the measurements were
complete, after difficulties both political and geodetic and not a few
compromises with the element of arbitrariness in the choice of any
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system of units. And representatives of Europe were summoned to the
first metrical Congress, ‘To receive the metre from the hands of
France.’ But nowhere — not even in France — were the new units in
daily usage before the 1840’s.
From the outset, Napoleon perceived the possibilities in the Institute
as an instrument for transmuting French universalism into cultural
imperialism. He was not only a captain of the armies, he was a member
of the Institute, who descended upon Egypt in 1798, accompanied by a
whole staff of scientific camp-followers — mineralogists, archaeologists,
cartographers, naturalists — headed by Monge, Berthollet and Geoffroy
Saint-Hilaire. Upon arrival they organised themselves into an Institute
of Cairo. The Rosetta Stone is their most famous find. The science of
Egyptology is their legacy. Its foundations were laid in the long months
following their desertion by its patron (by which default the British
Museum became residual legatee).
French institutions had already begun to reproduce themselves in
Italy. Article 297 of the Constitution of 1797 of the Cisalpine Republic
created at Milan an Istituto de Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, in three classes.
This body became an Istituto della Republica Italiana in 1802, moving
its seat to Bologna, and turned into the Imperiale Regio Istituto when
Italy became a kingdom in 1805. Napoleon exercised a beneficent
patronage over Italian science. The Florentine Academy revived under
Elisa, with the sciences in first place, and the mission of protecting the
purity of the Tuscan tongue. Bemedalled in Paris, Volta became a
count in Italy. It was at Napoleon’s own initiative that Eugene de-
centralised his Institute in 1810, establishing branches in Venice,
Padua and Verona, and returning the scientific class to Milan, the foyer
in Italy of the spirit of progress and industry. Elsewhere in the Grand
Empire, the surviving scientific bodies of the capitals sank to the level of
provincial academies. At the centre in Paris, Cuvier reached out in his
correspondence as Permanent Secretary of the First Class, and embraced
the science of Western Europe in its ambit. Everywhere these bodies
reverted to the legitimate sovereignties after the Restoration; but every-
where the novel emphasis on science in public service carried over into
nineteenth-century progressivism, and technical careers beckoned young
men of talent.
And all the while there survived on either flank of the Empire two
systems of scientific bodies influenced from Paris by scientific attraction
and political repulsion. Around the Royal Academy of Sciences of
Berlin gravitated its satellite of St Petersburg, both conceived in the
French image. For eastward the force of France bore on Prussia and
Russia through the continuum of Europe. But to the west, across the
temporary void of war and the deeper discontinuity which the sea and
history always bring between Anglo-Saxon and continental institutions,
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the infant societies of Philadelphia and Boston looked rather to the
Royal Society of London, and repeated its pattern of private and
voluntary effort improvising what on the continent had seemed, since
Colbert at least, to be functions of state.
Of the great cities, the most portentous scientifically was Berlin.
‘The State must make up in intellectual force what she has lost in
physical,’ declared Frederick William III in his traumatic winter of
1806, his army shattered at Jena, his capital the prey of the French, and
his patrimony the spoil of war. 1 And indeed, the rise of German
science and learning to their nineteenth-century predominance may
properly be celebrated as a glorious accompaniment to the progress of
the Prussian phoenix. Throughout the Enlightenment, French had
remained the language of Prussia’s Academy as of her king. Many
members of the Prussian Academy were French (and many in the
Russian Academy were German). The movement to Germanise stirred
in the romantic dawn of literary self-consciousness. From the beginning,
it expressed the yearning for national distinction in the peculiarly
German idea of Wissenschaft, wherein art, scholarship and science
become components of the highest capacity for creativity and awareness.
Reorganisation of the Prussian Academy completed a series of
reforms in which the brothers Humboldt took the lead when, after Jena
and Tilsit, it became a question, not only of scholarship, but of
retrieving a national disaster — through scholarship. Wilhelm von
Humboldt, the humanist, was in Berlin. Alexander von Humboldt, the
naturalist, was in Paris, and their collaboration epitomised the partner-
ship of philosophy and science in German culture. Alexander von
Humboldt knew the workings of the Institut de France and had actually
experienced what its imposition of standards achieved in rigorous
analysis. He would renovate the Prussian Academy in this same spirit
and practice of exact science. But this was a vision ampler than that of
the ideologues. He and his brother grafted their Academy upon the
stout stem of the German university tradition.
The University of Berlin was founded in 1809-10 to replace, in the
first instance, the lost and much mourned Universities of Halle and
Erlangen. But this was to be more than an affair of faculty and students.
It was to incorporate all the learned institutions of Berlin into a single
great foundation, which should associate the quest for truth in obser-
vatory, botanical garden, museum, and library with its communication
to young patriots by old philosophers. Every member of the Academy,
moreover, would be a member ex officio of the University, licensed and
encouraged to lecture in its halls. It is difficult to exaggerate the
importance of this new turn. It carried science out to the educated
1 A. Harnack, Geschichte der koniglich preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu
Berlin (2 vols., Berlin, 1900), vol. n, p. 556.
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class of a whole nation. For German culture — this was its peculiarity
and strength — spoke, not like French in the accent of the capital alone,
but with a hundred voices in the many universities scattered all across
the land and among the many states. The University of Berlin never
extinguished the older, smaller, and prouder centres of learning —
Heidelberg and Gottingen, Marburg and Giessen, Konigsberg and
Tubingen, Leipzig and Wurzburg. Instead, writes the historian of the
Academy, ‘The creation of the University of Berlin glows like a burning
point whereon all rays stream together.’ 1 For in universities science
could become popular and diffused as it never could be when associated
in the French fashion with academic hauteur and the specialised schools
of a technical elite.
That dissemination lay not very far in the future. Philological and
historical studies led the scholarship of the German revival, and by the
1830’s the yield was far greater there than in scientific reaches of
research. Nevertheless, the foundations were laid down on which by
mid-century Germany would construct her scientific pre-eminence.
In Germany the cause of science, scholarship and the universities was
also the cause of the most liberal and progressive elements in society and
politics. Whatever the fate of political liberalism east of the Rhine, its
scientific home is Germany. The method of the seminar, in which
advanced students are taught by employment on research itself, de-
veloped out of the technique of German university studies in philology,
classics, diplomatics and history. The scientific laboratory may not
itself be described as a German invention. Already in the 1790’s,
laboratories had developed beyond the personal to the institutional
stage. They no longer pertained typically to a man — Lavoisier, say, or
Priestley. The Ecole poly technique, the Museum d'histoire naturelle,
the Royal Institution in London — all maintained laboratories. But it
was in the German university that the laboratory became an adaptation
to science of the seminar technique, an instrument of research and
instruction combined, and the foyer of the doctorate.
And the first fruits do belong to our period. In 1826 Justus Liebig,
back from his studies in Paris under Gay-Lussac, opened the laboratory
of research and instruction at the University of Giessen which is always,
and properly, taken to symbolise the migration of chemical leadership
across the Rhine. In 1828 Friedrich Wohler accomplished the synthesis
of urea, the first product of metabolism to be reproduced experimentally
in the laboratory. Biological studies had already flourished, in the
somewhat idealistic, not to say mystical, vein encouraged by Goethe.
The school of Natur philosophic, led by Schelling, would contemplate the
unity of nature in some universal metamorphosis, and address biology
to the study of archetypal, almost Platonic, forms. Their mood was
1 Hamack, op. cit., vol. n, p. 557.
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that of Herder and historicism, of Hegel and the sense of process up
through time. But now biology would also be tempered and hardened
by the analytical spirit, and given body in the laboratory. Starting from
Goethe’s subjective and idealistic colour theory, which was wrong and
quite unscientific, Johannes Muller built up the physiology of sense-
perceptions and the specificity of reaction of the sensory organs — the
eye reporting fight when struck as well as when open. The German
climate had not as yet proved hospitable to a mathematical school.
Gauss lived and worked in self-taught eminence and wilful loneliness at
Gottingen, like Euler before him a European figure who often wrote in
Latin. In 1825, however, Carl Gustav Jacobi opened a seminar at
Berlin in the analytical methods of the French school. Out of it he
formed his own following. To contain their findings, and to free them-
selves from dependence on the Journal de VEcole polytechnique, they
started in 1826 their own journal, Crelle’s Journal, perhaps the most
distinguished of the specialised periodicals now springing into print in
every land to meet the need for communicating every science each to
his own kind. And finally, on 12 May 1827, Alexander von Humboldt
left Paris after a residence of a quarter of a century, to spend the thirty
years that remained to his astonishing career in Berlin, now at last fit
to be a capital of science as well as of Prussia.
Scientific Britain, down to 1830, presents quite another prospect,
her science, like her public fife, traversing the belated last chapter of
her old regime. There were notable achievements, of course, always in
the practical, empirical and individualistic, not to say idiosyncratic,
style which was the English counterpart to Gallic rational rigour or to
Teutonic metaphysical depth. Thomas Young and the wave model of
light, Humphry Davy and the inauguration of electrochemistry, John
Dalton and the atomic hypothesis of chemical combination — all that
argues vigorous scientific effort during the Napoleonic era. So, too, do
the almost exclusively British foundation of stratigraphical geology down
to 1830, and Faraday’s discovery how to induce the electrical current
by magnetism. Nevertheless, even if told in detail, this would be an
episodic story, inseparable from the personal chances of inventive men,
a story of scientists and not of science. And so it was that active and
critical minds, appreciative of the ingenuity of British scientists, agreed
upon the unwholesome and self-defeating state of British science.
Charles Babbage’s Reflections upon the Decline of Science in England
appeared in 1830. The tract was a summons to carry the pattern of
liberal and utilitarian modernisation into science. But the answer to the
summons belongs to the reform period and after. In England the French
Revolution came late to science as to politics.
There was as yet no such thing as a scientific profession in England,
nor any institutions in which to lead a scientific career. (In Scotland
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there were the universities, but they were small and poor.) Dalton was a
schoolmaster, Y oung a jack-of-all-trades, and Davy a careerist. Geology
was the hobby of clergymen and men of means. The Royal Society was
less the governor than the showplace of British science, which went quite
ungovemed. Unhappily, the Royal Society had fallen ill of the place-
seeking rot which afflicted corporate life in the eighteenth century, in
Church, in Municipality, in University, in Parliament. By the nine-
teenth century the patrician patron of science had become a stultifying
anachronism in societies which his seventeenth-century forebears had
helped by joining. Figures tell the tale. In 1830 the membership of the
Academy of Sciences in Paris was 75, of the Prussian Academy 38, and
of the Royal Society 685. The majority of this horde pretended to no
scientific qualifications. The society lived on their dues, that they might
write F.R.S. after their names.
The cleavage between science and the springs of power went deeper
into the social structure than the division between scientific and
aristocratic Fellows of the Royal Society. Science had grown up quite
outside the Establishment since the Restoration of Charles II. It had
become a ward of the Nonconformist rather than the Anglican com-
munity. The public schools taught neither science nor any modern
subject. No more did Oxford, and scarcely more did Cambridge.
Cambridge remained faithful less to mathematics than to the memory of
mathematics. Until the mid-i820’s the tutors taught synthesis rather
than analysis, and employed a fossilised Newtonian notation that dis-
qualified graduates from reading writings from the Continent. Thus was
British science thrown back upon those taught in dissenting academies,
in Scottish universities, or by themselves. The poverty, amounting to
destitution, of British mathematical achievement was one consequence.
Mathematics was already the language of theory and the arbiter of
taste in physics. And quite generally the literature of British science
betrays that want of elegance which is too often the penalty attaching
to the worthiest of radical self-educations. England, indeed, had
divorced vigour of mind from urbanity of taste when she excluded the
dissenting community from attendance at Oxford and degrees at
Cambridge. That she achieved so much against this handicap attests
rather to the vigour of her minds than to some virtue of self-help in
science. It is difficult to think that Davy, Faraday, and Young would
not have done even more had they been trained in mathematics.
Meanwhile, out on either extremity of the ambit of European culture,
Russia and the United States addressed contrasting institutions to
comparable scientific opportunities and resources. Virtually suppressed
under Paul, the Imperial Academy of Sciences of St Petersburg was
reorganised and granted a certain autonomy in 1803, but recovered its
vitality only after 1815. It published in French now, rather than in the
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Latin of the eighteenth century, and Russians began to displace the
Baltic and German majority in its chairs. Russia has consistently
practised the scientific etatisme of the Continent. In America, on the
other hand, the Napoleonic wars had intensified the tendency created
by common language and a common metric to depend primarily upon
British scientific associations, and upon the voluntary pattern.
Physicians, professors, and enlightened clergymen and men of affairs
in Philadelphia and Boston continued the American Philosophical
Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as mildly
honorific service organisations. The colleges — Harvard, Yale,
Columbia, Princeton, Pennsylvania — modelled themselves rather on
eighteenth-century dissenting academies or on the Scottish universities
than on Oxford and Cambridge, and made increasing room for natural
history and natural philosophy. Both in America and in Russia, how-
ever, the major scientific problem was one of acquisition rather than
advancement. Both looked back to a recent culture-hero, an eighteenth-
century polymath and philosophe — to Lomonosov or to Benjamin
Franklin. Nevertheless, neither country could yet sustain a deep and
steady stream of fundamental science. Most contributions from Russia
and America were such as depended upon the situation: geographical
and geological explorations, meteorological and astronomical informa-
tion, studies of local flora and fauna.
All the foregoing concerns the public history of science. Its private
history must be told rather in relation to nature than to society. And
the secular movement of science per se in our period will appear most
boldly in reviewing the deepening grasp and widening reach over
phenomena encompassed by the two chief devices for reducing descrip-
tions of the world to statements of exact quantity — mathematics and
experiment. On the one hand, science moved from the eighteenth
century into the nineteenth amid a golden glow of confidence in classical
analysis. On the other hand, experiment now became, not simply the
talisman of a Boyle, a Lavoisier or a Priestley, but a systematic,
regularised procedure conducted in established laboratories from which
reproducible results were reported in specialised periodicals. This was
more than a change of scale. For until this development occurred,
experiment was rather the characteristic instrument of a Baconian,
classificatory science than it was the complement to mathematics in an
abstract, quantifying science. And if a central theme were to be found
for these decades, it would be the encroachment of exact and quanti-
tative science upon ‘natural history’, that old sympathetic vein of collect-
ing and ticketing characteristic samples of all the objects and wonders
of the world.
It was the golden age of analysis. The task of the eighteenth century
had been to translate Newtonian mechanics from geometric to algebraic
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terms, and to define quantities to suit the latter language. Science
would describe the laws by which bodies move as inertial masses sub-
ject to radial forces, attractive or repulsive. Sun and planets offered the
gross model of a mechanical system. And the Mecanique celeste of
Laplace stands as the monument to this ideal of science. Between 1808
and 1823 that great work assembled in five volumes the perfected
memoirs in which Laplace had demonstrated that every apparent
exception to the Newtonian theory of gravity is in fact an instance of its
validity. Therein he resolved one after another all the discrepancies
between prediction and observation, showed that seeming anomalies
were expressions of mutual gravitation among the planets themselves,
and calculated the corrected theories of the heavenly bodies. Indeed,
the phrase ‘Newtonian World-Machine’ is a misnomer. The actual
world-machine was computed by Laplace.
The System of the World, a fine essay in responsible popularisation,
expresses Laplace’s faith in a deterministic and universal science of
matter in motion in service to Newton’s laws. Even the historical
development of the solar system from some original nebula into the
present congeries of masses might be embraced in such a conception.
Nor was Laplace’s other great work, mathematically his far more
original work, the Analytical Theory of Probabilities, unrelated to his
high determinism. A mind of infinite capacity informed by senses of
an infinitesimal refinement might know the position and velocity of
every particle of matter in the world, and thereby foretell the future
with perfect accuracy. But there is no such mind. There are no such
senses. It is the limitation of our capacity, the inevitability of our
errors, and not some imperfection in the scheme of things, which throws
science back upon probabilities as upon a crutch. This is the branch of
analysis which estimates and hence reduces the role of error and
mitigates the play of ignorance. A similar association between the per-
fection of stellar motion and the imperfection of observation appears
in the lonelier work of Gauss. The first of the asteroids, Ceres, was
picked up by Piazzi at the Observatory of Palermo on the very first
evening of the nineteenth century. Calculating her course from a very
few elements led Gauss to devise a new and more general method of
computing celestial orbits. And Gauss formulated also the Law of
Error, the method of least squares for taking the most probable value
among a series of varying observations, or (what was geometrically the
same problem) of finding the bullseye amid the dispersion pattern of
shots on a target.
But though this, the analytical vindication of Newton in the heavens,
was the most dramatic conquest of this science, it was Lagrange’s
abstract formalisation of mechanics in general, from macro to micro,
from comet to mass-point, which stood in all algebraic austerity before
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this generation as the examplar of tact and taste in mathematical
physics. Published in 1788, Mecanique analytique announced the policy
by which the analytical school of Paris would press into the new
domains of experimental fact — into heat, light, electricity and chemistry.
No geometry nor any graphs or pictures sullied the pure pages of
Lagrange. There equations marched without interruption from the
principle of virtual velocities through the whole field of statics, and
from d’Alembert’s principle right through dynamics.
Even so would Joseph Fourier in The Analytical Theory of Heat in
1822 simply eschew the question which agitated more concrete minds,
whether heat is a weightless fluid substance or a manifestation of motion
in the particles of matter. ‘Of the nature of heat,’ he writes, ‘uncertain
hypotheses only could be formed, but the knowledge of the mathe-
matical laws to which its effects are subject is independent of all
hypothesis; it requires only an attentive examination of the chief facts
which common observations have indicated, and which have been
confirmed by exact experiments.’ ‘The effects of heat’ he explains
‘are subject to constant laws which cannot be discovered without the
aid of mathematical analysis. The object of the theory which we are
about to explain is to demonstrate these laws; it reduces all physical
researches on the propagation of heat, to problems of the integral
calculus whose elements are given by experiment.’ Elsewhere he says,
‘These considerations present a singular example of the relations which
exist between the abstract science of numbers and natural causes.’
And it is an instructive instance of those relations that it was this analysis
of a physical problem which led Fourier to devise the series for expand-
ing functions by sines and cosines of multiple arcs. ‘Profound study
of nature,’ he says, ‘is the most fertile source of mathematical dis-
coveries.’ 1 It was magnificent, this ferocious abstraction from all
models in Lagrange and Fourier. But perhaps it was excessive. It
never led on to a science of energy, as did the more naive debate
between heat as substance and heat as motion. But it was eminently
in the spirit of a purely rational mechanics.
Physics had two characteristics. Its model of order was astronomical,
and its technique was analytical. Thus Newton’s law of gravity served
as exemplar of a force law, to be adapted to other realms, and physicists
would strive to express their findings in the formalism of the differen-
tial calculus. They would write equations of which the elements were
point-masses under the influence of forces that diminished in intensity
as the square of the distance between any two in question. Already
in the 1780’s Coulomb had demonstrated with a torsional balance
that the inverse square relationship governs the interaction between
1 Joseph Fourier, The Analytical Theory of Heat, trans. A. Freeman (Cambridge, 1878).
The passages quoted will be found on pp. 26, 14, 24, and 7, respectively.
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magnetic and electrostatic charges, here considered as masses. As with
Newtonian gravity, only this essentially geometrical relationship ob-
tained between centres of force. Theory contemplated no physical
connection, no mechanical linkages, across the intervening space. In
1791 Galvani made the first artificial electrical current flow around a
circuit including as fundamental elements the nerves of a frog’s leg and
a metallic couple. Beginning in 1800, Volta learned to sustain the
current by means of his ‘piles’ composed of coupled discs of silver and
zinc, each pair separated by a layer of moist felt. From 1806, Humphry
Davy turned the wet cell to chemical account in the isolation of new
elements. And then in 1820 Hans Christian Oersted reaped the reward
of his idealistic belief in the ultimate identity of all the forces of nature,
and found that an electric current in a wire affects a magnetic needle.
Word of this effect reached Paris, whereupon Ampere immediately
established the mutually attractive and repulsive effects of currents on
each other. Ampere was a polytechnician. True to his training, he
named the new subject electrodynamics, and set about to embrace
electromagnetic induction in the formalism of corpuscular mechanics.
This task required great virtuosity. For Ampere had to treat the ele-
ments of each current infinitesimally and to suppose that the force is
radial which operates between any two electrical point-masses in
motion. For himself, he said explicitly, scientific explanation consisted
in resolving phenomena into statements of the quantity of equal and
opposite forces acting and reacting between pairs of particles. Ampere
brought great clarification. He abolished the distinction in kind between
static and dynamic electricity, and assimilated the difference to the
categories of mechanics. The term which appears as height in gravita-
tional equations becomes statical potential in electrical ones.
Meanwhile, the laboratory was bringing quantification to the
physical sciences in another vein throughout these years, not in this
imperious abstraction, but concretely by measurement and simple,
systematic numeration. Chemistry now completed its revolution into
the status of an exact science by taking decisive advantage of Lavoisier’s
principle of conservation of mass and his conception of oxidation and
reaction. Fundamental though that work of theory had been, Lavoisier
still organised the science by classification and nomenclature, by
principles of language rather than of measure. And the atomic hypo-
thesis ultimately attached numbers of general significance to the in-
dividual substances of the chemical population. This was no simple
tale. John Dalton was thinking along channels that ran straight
back through the Newtonian and corpuscular philosophy of the
seventeenth century, and beyond that all the way to antiquity and the
Epicurean policy which made change in nature a rearrangement of the
parts rather than an alteration of qualities. He was at first concerned
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with the physical behaviour of gases, in diffusion and in solution.
That led him to the question of the relative weights of particles, and
from this physical question he moved on to the chemical thought that
the percentage composition of compounds must be in proportion to the
weights of the constituent atoms. If so, then the intimate structure of
compounds must be discrete atom-to-atom linkages. What was
novel here was the combined notion of the atom, first as distinguished
chemically by the physical attribute of weight (rather than shape),
and secondly as specific to the chemical element (rather than being the
last point of physical division).
Nor was Dalton himself perfectly clear that his advantage lay in
exploiting the strategy of weight as the chemist’s metric. What pleased
h im more was the naked (and mistaken) numerical notion that atoms
always combine in the simplest ratios — one-to-one in the case of ele-
ments that combined to form only one compound, one-to-two or two-
to-one for the next higher order in cases (like nitrogen and oxygen)
which form a series of compounds in differing proportions. Thus,
for Dalton, water was HO. Nor did he prove the two empirical
laws of definite and multiple proportions. He simply assumed the
invariability of chemical composition, and then offered the atomic
hypothesis as an explanation. And such was his pleasure in his simplest
ratios that he failed to see confirmation of the atomic model itself in a
beautiful discovery of Gay-Lussac in his laboratory at Poly technique.
In 1809 Gay-Lussac established that volumes of gases which react
chemically do so in some ratio of small whole numbers. But not
necessarily the simplest ratio — thus, one volume of oxygen combines
With two (not one) of hydrogen to give two of water. That equal
volumes of gases contain equal numbers of particles was the obvious
explanation. This was reconcilable with Dalton’s gravimetric ratios
through the suggestion, proposed independently by Ampere and
Avogadro, that molecules may be polyatomic.
Moreover, cross-currents in the torrent of discovery obscured the
clarity of these relations and brought more information than the
atomic hypothesis might organise. Electrolysis was a cornucopia of
new metals, opened by Humphry Davy — potassium, sodium, barium,
strontium, calcium and magnesium. In Paris Gay-Lussac identified
gaseous elements at the opposite electrode — chlorine and iodine.
The greatest chemist of the period was Berzelius. He designated the
elements with the symbols they still bear, and built up a table of their
combining weights based on oxygen as 100. Because of the contrary
polarity of metals and (say) the oxygen, chlorine, or iodine with which
they combine, he considered the chemical bond to be the attraction
between positively and negatively charged atoms. For this reason, he
made dualistic classification of the elements according to their electrical
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properties — and refused to admit the polyatomic molecule. These and
other fruitful confusions led the atomic hypothesis a chequered career.
Nevertheless, it did now exist as a scientific hypothesis and not simply
as an ontological policy. And this subjection of the science of combin-
ing matter to the rule of number was what made chemistry an exact and
no longer a mere descriptive science, continuous with physics now
rather than with natural history.
To return for a moment to physics, the partnership of experiment and
theory in nineteenth-century science nowhere appears more character-
istically than in the work which created the first faint cloud in classical
corpuscular mechanics. The nineteenth-century wave-theory of light
was the joint work of Thomas Young and Augustin Fresnel. Young
was a self-taught prodigy, ingenious in the English way and unskilled
in mathematics. In 1802 and 1804 he published experiments which dis-
played interference phenomena in a fashion that argued the periodicity
of light. Fresnel was a polytechnician whose brief career lay mainly in
the i 82 o’s. Ignorant at first of Young’s work, he expressed the same
results in partial differential equations of the second order. They struck
a discordant note in the physics of the day since they described the
motion of the wave in a medium instead of the particle in a void. More-
over, Fresnel postulated of the medium, the aether, just that paradoxical
elasticity and permeability which would later make it the seat of the
continuous field not yet conceived in Faraday’s mind.
Biology was the coming science in the nineteenth century, favoured
by positivists and romantics alike. Comparative anatomy dominated
in the first third of the century. At the same time, however, the great
technical specialties were forming in the laboratories — histology,
embryology and physiology together with foreshadowings of cytology
and pathology. These were the studies in which by mid-century biology
would transcend the superficiality of natural history and the dependence
on medicine. Intellectually, the problem of biology was one of scientific
self-knowledge. The character, nature and object of the science needed
to be defined. In over-simplified accounts, mechanism and vitalism are
presented as the alternatives. Might phenomena of life be reduced to
laws of physical nature, i.e. to mechanics? Or is life different? Per-
haps ineffable? The boundary intruded even into chemistry where the
inappropriate distinction between organic and inorganic compounds
preserves its memory. One might have thought the question settled in
principle by Wohler’s synthesis of urea in 1828. But it was not, for the
real issue was deeper and more complex than vitalism, a vague position
at best. What kind of science was biology to be? Not mathematical,
evidently. What then? What model of order was it to contemplate?
The organismic? If so, the organism was the ultimate object of inquiry,
the whole rather than the parts. Or the physical ? If so, its object will
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be the order and arrangement of the parts, as in physics, rather than
some superior wisdom of the whole. And it makes an instructive lesson
in the difference between what scientists say and what they do, that
different answers were given to these questions of scope and method
by each of the four leading biologists of these decades, and that neverthe-
less their works chimed harmoniously together. Lamarck and Cuvier,
firm in their disagreement over theory, together established by com-
parative anatomy the fundamental classifications of systematic biology.
Bichat and Magendie, on the other hand, the one regarding himself as a
student of life and the other of living machinery, succeeded one another
at the head of the great, deep-cutting tradition of experimental biology
in the nineteenth century.
The founder of histology, Xavier Bichat, may be considered a pro-
totype of the professional biologist. Bichat took life to be the object
of his science, and defined it in a famous formula as the ‘ensemble of
functions that resist death’. He has, on this score, often been called a
vitalist. Nevertheless, Bichat was not one to regard biology as a refuge
from determinism, or as lacking in the rigour of physics. His intellectual
method was the strictest application to organisms of the analytical
technique. He would resolve the study of organisms into the knowledge
of their elements. These he found in the tissues, each type with a
specific function. That is the principle of his Anatomie generate of
1801: ‘All animals are assemblies of diverse organs which, each per-
forming its own function, co-operate in conserving the whole. They are
so many particular machines in the general machine which constitutes
the individual. But these particular machines are themselves formed of
several tissues of very different types which form the true elements of the
organs. Chemistry has its simple bodies . . . Anatomy has its simple
tissues which, by their combinations . . . form the organs’. 1 Bichat was
less fortunate in his doctrine of the two lives, animal and vegetable,
situated respectively in the symmetrical and unsymmetrical organs. The
forward thrust of his analysis was sharpened by his passion for dis-
sections, practiced in the wards and morgues of the Hotel-Dieu of
Paris, in which fetid corners he caught a fever and died in 1802 at the
age of thirty-one, brilliant and barely under way, and the inspiration
of all who knew him.
The practice of experimental biology was extended and consolidated
in the career of Francois Magendie of the College de France, where
he installed the first laboratory. Severe and mechanistic, Magendie held
that organisms were complex problems in chemistry and physics. He
published a corrected edition of Bichat, in which he as editor skips in
footnotes along the bottoms of the pages pointing up to the beauty of
his teacher’s findings and the error of his views. Since Magendie
1 Anatomie generate (1812 edition, Paris), vol. 1, p. bodx.
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severely renounced all general views, he himself left a collection of fine
discoveries, especially in neuro-physiology, but no body of thought.
Even more important, perhaps, was the example he set of experimental
discipline and fidelity to fact. Claude Bernard was his great pupil, in
whose work experiment would truly rival mathematics in precision,
fertility and sophistication. And already the process by which French
rationality took on body in German thoroughness was bringing sobriety
and realism to German science, and foreshadowing a symbiosis between
the science of biology and the culture of Germany. In 1824 Prevost and
J. B. Dumas established the role of spermatozoa in the fertilisation of
frogs’ eggs, and observed the differentiation that ensued. In 1827
Karl von Baer identified the ovum itself in the ovary of a bitch. The
discovery announced the imminence both of cytology and embryology.
This experimental motif prepared the future of biology as an exact
science. In its contemporary state, however, the humbler instrument of
taxonomy still seemed the way to order things all across the living front
of nature. Lamaick’s Natural History of Invertebrates was published
between 1815 and 1822. Cuvier’s Animal Kingdom appeared in 1817 in
four volumes, followed by Researches on Fossil Bones in seven volumes
from 1821 to 1824. In this painstaking detail natural history passed
over from Aristotelian classifications to those of modern zoology. The
newer science linked old nature with living in palaeontology. It estab-
lished relationships between species in space and time by the rigorous
techniques of comparative anatomy. The regulative principle was
Cuvier’s, the principle of correlation of parts. ‘Every organic being,’
he laid down, ‘forms an ensemble, a unique closed system, of which all
the parts mutually correspond, and co-operate in any definitive act
through reciprocal relations. No one of these parts may change without
the others changing also, and consequently each of them, taken separ-
ately, indicates and gives all the others’. 1 Thus, confronted with a tooth,
Cuvier could predict what the hoof would be, or the digestive tract ; and
by this means he related the creature’s organisation to its way of life.
Lamarck applied Cuvier’s technique to the classification of inverte-
brates, a task which he discharged with acumen and skill. But although
the actual work of Cuvier and Lamarck was complementary, their
thinking presupposed very different models of biological order, the one
naturalistic and metamorphic, the other theological and providential.
Lamarck published his Philosophie zoologique in 1809. The argument
has since become famous as anticipating the theory of evolution and
offering a humane and idealistic alternative to the mechanistic tenour
of natural selection. Lamarck’s views were in fact derived from the
organismic and romantic philosophy of nature started by Diderot, and
1 Georges Cuvier, Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles (nouvelle ed., 5 vols. in 6; Paris,
1821-4), vol. 1, p. xlv.
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charged with power by Goethe. His theory of evolution was an applica-
tion to taxonomy of this outlook, and it is famous only since Darwin.
In his own generation Lamarck’s speculations about transformation of
species were regarded by his colleagues as the embarrassing aberrations
of a gifted observer, to be passed over in silence. Living nature, in
Lamarck’s zoological philosophy, is a plastic force, forever forming
all manner of animals from the simplest to the most complex by the
progressive differentiation and perfection of their organisation. But
the innate tendency to complication and specialisation is not the only
factor at work. Over against it, constraining it into shapes which we
mistakenly think of as immutable species, works the influence of the
physical environment. Changes in environment lead to changes in
needs. Changes in needs produce changes in behaviour. Changes in
behaviour become habits, which ultimately alter individual organs
and even the whole organism. Thus, the environment is a shifting
set of circumstance and opportunity to which the organism responds
creatively.
Cuvier’s was by far the more characteristic, conservative and per-
suasive explanation of biological adaptation, that striking fact in the
relation of organisms to the economy of their lives, of form to function.
This was simply the old argument from design. It had been respectable
ever since the time of Aristotle, the master classifier, and had long been
the mainstay of Christian natural theology. In this perspective all
nature is a divine artifact, and every effect is a device for carrying out the
purposes of the creator. Cuvier’s conception of his science was con-
servative and Aristotelian in yet another way, a way most important
for the value which his work would hold for Darwin. He was a natura-
list rather than a biologist. He distinguished in science between
‘physique generate ’ and ‘physique particuliere’, or natural history.
And Cuvier would agree with the argument of the present chapter that
quantification and experiment make the difference. ‘Physique generate, ’
comprising mechanics, dynamics and chemistry, admits quantification
and employs experiment. Not so natural history, which studies the
particular object and may not aspire to abstract theories. Experiment is
impossible in natural history, thought Cuvier, since to dissect a living
whole is to destroy the object under study. Comparison must take the
place of experiment, and thus the naturalist may only discern by
observation and shrewd judgment the operation in his realm of laws
which the physicist has discovered in his.
Despite his own belief in fixed species, the comparisons of Cuvier’s
natural history rather than the speculations of Lamarck were what
readied the scene for evolutionary biology. Already in Cuvier, the
creature’s organisation is a function of its way of life. Darwin will only
have to turn the argument from design on its head to explain adaptation
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naturalistically instead of theologically. He will have to transfer the
problem of arrangement of discrete populations into that of historic
phyla and to ask for pedigrees as well as to make comparisons. Cuvier
himself raised the question of succession in the populations of the globe.
Palaeontology was the great development of his later years, a new science
of archaic forms. And thus if biology joined on to chemistry and
physics on the one side through its growing mastery of experiment, on
the other it merged through natural history into geology and description
of the world.
Thanks to the key offered in palaeontology, the early nineteenth
century was the heroic age for geology, when it first mastered its
materials. Until the i79o’s, the study of the earth was little more than an
indeterminate blend of mineralogical lore with speculations about the
origins of the globe. In 1795 James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth did
assert the principle of uniformity of nature in historical terms. Hutton
would restrict geologists to inductive analogies from the effects of natural
forces currently in operation. He required a near infinity of time (‘no
vestige of a beginning — no prospect of an end’), and the ‘Vulcanist’
school he inspired argued for the igneous origin of the fundamental
formations. Their views were opposed, violently at times, by ‘Neptun-
ists’, followers in the early 1800’s of Abraham Gottlob Werner, of the
Mine school of Freiberg-im-Sachsen, who fought fire with water, and
whose followers held to the aqueous deposition of all strata in a series of
vasty inundations. These disputes would have remained quite unsettled
had it not been for discovery of the technique of fossil stratigraphy. The
pioneer was William Smith, an English drainage engineer who between
1810 and 1820 identified successive formations from East Anglia and the
Channel across to the coal measures of Wales by reference to their
characteristic populations of fossils embedded in the rock. And in the
more recent layers of the Paris basin, Cuvier and Brongniart employed
similar palaeontological indices for geological classification.
Cuvier, together with most of his English colleagues in the 1820’s,
saw the evidence in the light of the doctrine of geological catastrophes,
and they still placed it in a time-scale reduced to the dimensions of
human history. No doubt theological presuppositions disposed their
minds in favour of the flood. But this was no simple question of the
Bible, true or false. It was a deeper issue of the relation of God to
nature. Geology was the first science to touch on the history as well as
the structure of nature, and the first, therefore, to contemplate God as
governor and not simply as creator. Nor did science here speak with
determinate authority. In traversing the front of early nineteenth-
century science, we left the realm of the exact and quantitative for the
merely descriptive when we moved across the divide marked by Cuvier
in biology between the new experimental disciplines and the old
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practice of natural history. By ranging the forms of life in the secular
order of the geological succession, from the simpler to the more com-
plex, palaeontology prepared the evidence for ordering science in historic
time by means of evolutionary theory. But not yet, not quite yet.
When the scene shifts from theory to practice, from science to
industry, Britain rather than France appears the technical pacemaker
and schoolmaster of Europe. The progress of the steam engine — there
was the truly revolutionary element in the process of industrialisation.
Increments of power now began waxing exponentially along a curve
bound to rise infinitely above what could be pulleyed, levered, geared and
screwed out of the actions of man or animal, wind or falling water.
After Watt’s retirement in 1800, Trevithick developed engines toward
the employment of higher pressures, double-action pistons, and re-
duction in the beams. Horizontal cylinders began to appear only after
1825. And engines found application, no longer just in pumping or
blowing the blast, but in locomotion and in powering factories in place
of water-wheels. Fulton ran his steamboat from New York to Albany
in 1807. Trevithick built a locomotive in 1805, and Stephenson a better
one in 1813 for use in Killingworth colliery. In 1830 Stephenson’s first
train ran from Liverpool to Manchester. But what impressed con-
temporaries even more notably was the application of steam to cotton,
first for spinning, then for weaving. The change from water to steam
shifted industry from rural streamsides into centres of population, and
scarred the face of many a Midland city with the hideous factories of
the early industrial age. By 1830 the cotton mills of Manchester had
reached enormity as well as immensity. But, except here and there in
France, none of this had gone beyond the stage of pilot plants outside of
Britain.
This most important sector of industrial technique bore little relation
to science — unless it be that James Watt named the linkage a ‘sun-and-
planet-gear’ by which he converted the reciprocating action of a
piston to the rotary motion of a wheel. Indeed, it is somewhat puzzling
to know precisely what credence to give the common belief in science
as the fructifying seed in technology. Their intimacy produced offspring
only within the last hundred years or so. Nevertheless, the prophecies
of Francis Bacon had shaped belief long before, and never more con-
fidently than on the early nineteenth-century eve of their fulfilment.
Theoretical science still had very little to offer to industry. But if the
concept of a scientific movement be enlarged so as to include, not
merely ordered knowledge of nature, but systematic patterns of ration-
ality, empiricism, and coercion of opportunity throughout the whole
realm of technics, then the behaviour of the engineers and industrialists
resonates with that of men of science.
Rationality — the encyclopedic movement had left the extravagances
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of Diderot far behind and expressed itself prosaically now, in two
great compilations, the Encyclopedic methodique and the Encyclopedia
Britannica , and in many lesser technical dictionaries. Nor was this
in principle different from the taxonomies of systematic biology. It is
to be seen as the application of descriptive science to industry, pub-
licising and thus standardising, not some novelty suggested by theory,
but the best method used in practice. Publicity was a condition of the
awards offered to inventors by the societies for the stimulation of
industry, the Royal Society of Arts in England and the Societe d' en-
couragement of Napoleonic France. Similarly, patents must ultimately
come into the public domain. Continental patent legislation dates
from the Revolution. Hence, too, stemmed the systematic interchange
through societies and publications of agricultural information among
‘improving’ landowners, not only in England now, but also in Prussia
and even Austria. Agronomy attempted to supersede the ignorant
routine of centuries in a descriptive science of farming, the same for all
producers. Lore gave way to method, secrecy to publicity, craftsman-
ship to mechanisation and division of labour. In many sectors reason
thus marched into industry and analysed procedures into elements.
Eli Whitney of New Haven, Connecticut, was the apostle if not the
inventor of interchangeable parts. Is it fanciful to describe this move-
ment as the importation into machinery of the very possibility of
rationality created by the scientist’s assumptions of uniformity in
nature? Thenceforth the student of machines could analyse structures
with the same expectations of generality as an anatomist. Henry
Maudslay pivoted his engineering practice upon the cutting of uniform
screws. His lathe equipped with a slide rest for assuring plane surfaces
was the fundamental machine tool, and precise machine tools are the
guardians of the republic of engineering. Maudslay’ s micrometer of 1829
reduced tolerances to the vanishing. And writing of the quality of his
influence, his contemporary biographer and disciple, James Nasmyth,
tells of ‘ the innate love of truth and accuracy which distinguished Mr
Maudslay’. 1
The nature of materials and the empirical knowledge of their pro-
perties determines within limits what the most rational technology can
make of them. The chemical industry, though not the greatest in drama
or scale, was the most novel in point of product and possibility. Nor
did its innovations depend upon theory. The atomic hypothesis was
no help in a dye works or sulphuric acid plant. Even Lavoisier’s re-
orientation of the science around the theory of combustion was
irrelevant to the requirement of the manufacturer. What profited the
industrialist was rather the increasing volume of detailed experience in
1 Quoted in Friedrich Klemm, A History of Western Technology (New York, 1959),
p. 285.
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the handling and behaviour of diverse chemicals. Commercial soda and
sulphuric acid were the' fundamental heavy chemicals. Effective and
economical methods for the production of both were in operation by the
i83o’s. James Muspratt of Liverpool put the Leblanc process for
extracting soda from sea-salt into profitable operation in 1823. He did
not understand the reactions involved. No one did until the 1890’s,
by which time the method was being superseded. The Leblanc process
converted sodium sulphate to soda by fusion with charcoal and limestone.
A quite fallacious analogy with smelting ore was what had suggested
it to Leblanc himself. That was long before. He took out his patent in
Paris in 1791, and the factors that then impeded his own exploitation
were political, personal and economic, not theoretical. Throughout
the industry, indeed, chance and fortune governed within the boundaries
of technical possibility. The lead-chamber process for sulphuric acid
depended on the imperviousness of lead, and thus freed producers from
the limitations in scale imposed by the use of glass vessels. Scotland
was in the business from the mid-eighteenth century, and England a little
later. What induced its expansion in the 1830’s was the market created
by the soda trade. So it was in all the chemical industry. Every novel
outlet and every cut in price created a pull felt throughout the whole
nexus of connections between acids, alkalis, fertilisers, bleaches, dyes,
glass, soap and gunpowder, and all redounded to economic growth.
Perhaps the important themes in the evolution of technology are to
be understood in Lamarckian rather than Darwinian terms. For
industry requires the coercion of opportunity. Technology is art, not
nature, and is goal-directed. Acquired characteristics of machines are
inherited. And only some evolutionary formula will contain the growth
of the iron industry. The most fundamental material changeover in
industrialisation was the substitution of iron for wood and stone as the
basic structural substance. The nineteenth century was literally the
iron age. But this was not the result of some crucial invention. Sub-
stitution of coke for charcoal permitted rather than caused expansion.
Only in Britain was coke generally the fuel by the end of the Napoleonic
wars. Foundries altered in design to accommodate the new fuel, and
grew in scale to serve the market. Cast and puddled iron had still to do
the work awaiting steel. Furnaces rose higher when steam blew the
blast, straining upwards for advantage like Lamarckian giraffes. And
the evolutionary metaphor does impose itself in thinking about the
stages of the major components of technology. In transport, for
example, the system of canals and turnpikes was suited to a highly
specialised and temporary set of circumstances and elicited by a rapid
expansion of demand for cheap and certain haulage. Our brief period
almost contains the canal age, however, and one may imagine it
represented on one of those diagrams where phyla vary in width along
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the ages, a ribbon of possibility waxing into fatness in some certain time
of swamps, only to attenuate and continue as a thread after a slight
change in circumstance. After 1830 canals gave place to railways as
rapidly as they had appeared.
Occasional voices might be raised across the divide that still separated
science and industry in practice. Humphry Davy designed the miners’
safety lamp upon appeal from humanitarians. Joseph Fraunhofer, an
optician by trade, identified the absorption lines in the solar spectrum.
Machine tools benefited from the skills developed in the manufacture of
precision instruments to the exacting specifications of scientific clients.
New elements found unexpected uses. A great chemist, Berthollet,
developed the technique of bleaching by chlorine, and applied himself
to the rationalisation of dye-stuffs. Adventurers filled balloons with
hydrogen, and the aerial observation of artillery fire began at the battle
of Fleurus in 1794. Fresnel earned his living as an engineer for the
French highway and harbour administration, and designed the lenticular
fight-house beacon to replace the feeble torches and lanterns for which
ship-captains had anxiously had to peer. In 1799 London’s Royal
Institution was founded to brighten the life of the poor by instruction
in science. The patron, Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, an
ingenious Yankee turned renegade and ennobled by the Elector of
Bavaria, was also the experimental originator of a mechanical view of
heat, a designer of flues, and the husband for a time of Lavoisier’s
widow. In the 1820’s Mechanics’ Institutes carried on the movement
for the scientific improvement of the working men themselves. And in
1831 the British Association for the Advancement of Science, modelled
after ephemeral German societies, prepared to carry science to more
influential segments of the population, and to permeate the nation with
its spirit in the interests of progress.
Among these random voices, two contributed deeper statements.
Sadi Carnot published Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat in 1824.
Michael Faraday announced the induction of an electrical current in a
magnetic field in 1831. The two findings were quite unrelated. They
started, indeed, the two new subjects, thermodynamics and field physics,
in which physics would ultimately transcend its classical Newtonian
heritage. And — what may seem even more significant — they opened the
dialogue, since become incessant, between basic science and rational
technology. Technology for its part poses problems worthy of the
theorist’s steel. Science replies by arming technology with powers, so
enhancing its capacities that the employment decides the fate of men and
nations, and the combination is thus become the arbiter of civilisation.
Carnot’s was an extremely abstract memoir. The reasoning is all
about steam engines, however, and this no doubt was what inspired a
famous remark by L. J. Henderson to the effect that science owes more
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to the steam engine than does the steam engine to science. What are the
optimum conditions for converting (as does a steam engine) heat to
motion? That is the question which Carnot put, or which the analytical
spirit of Poly technique put in his mouth. And to answer it, he imagined
the reversible heat cycle in an ideal engine. Two reservoirs contain heat,
one at a higher and the other at a lower temperature. Flowing from the
former, heat expands the gas in a cylinder, pushing the piston first at
constant temperature, then at constant pressure. Reversing these steps
successively, the piston then compresses the gas and casts the heat
down to the second reservoir. In place of an actual engine, full of
friction, leaking heat, its piston slamming to and fro quite irreversibly,
Carnot substituted this ideal engine, departing from and returning to an
initial state. The finding is that the motive power of heat depends only
on the absolute temperature-differential across which it is employed.
And the reasoning founded the science of thermodynamics, abstracted
from the hiss of the steam to the general case of ‘all imaginable heat
engines’.
Faraday’s discovery reciprocated knowledge-out-of-power with
power-out-of-knowledge. His scrupulous conscience about facts might
also be taken as a decisive instance of the degree to which experiment
had become capable of the precisions more traditionally reserved to
mathematics. The inductive current came to him as the reward of a
shrewd, patient series of experiments in which he sought to produce the
reverse of Oersted’s effect and to get electricity from a magnetic field.
Frustration greeted his first attempts. No current could be made to stir
in the circuit except at the moment of presenting or withdrawing the
coil or magnet. But it was the signet of Faraday’s genius to exploit his
disappointments rather than to wilt in discouragement. And he found
that the secret of sustaining current precisely was to cut continuously
through the lines of force (as he later called them). He had, in a word,
come upon the principle of the dynamo. He himself was a scientist,
interested in nature rather than advantage, in reputation rather than
profit. Nevertheless, the ensuing development of the electrical industry
was in all the long history of science the first truly portentous applica-
tion of a major piece of basic research (and not just of rational method)
to the occasions of industry. Electrical power poured from the dynamo
to augment the capacities of steam. Not only so, but (to look far ahead)
critical analysis of spatial relations involved in electromagnetic ‘lines
of force’ was at the bottom of relativity and its prediction of the con-
vertibility of matter into energy, whether by fusion or by fission.
Power out of knowledge, in hardest fact.
IO
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CHAPTER VI
RELIGION: CHURCH AND STATE IN EUROPE
AND THE AMERICAS
C ross and Tricolour had become opposing symbols for m illions
of Europeans by the end of 1793. In France, the fatal split
between Church and Revolution, opened wide by the Civil
Constitution of the Clergy, now seemed unbridgeable (see Vol. VIII,
Chapter XXIV). In 1790 it had seemed self-evident to the Constituent
Assembly that the Gallican Church should be reorganised and brought
into line with the democratic institutions of the new France, that her
officers should be elected by the people, and be independent of alien
control. But this had raised the crucial question of competence and
authority. What right had even a national assembly so drastically to
reorganise a branch of a Catholic Church? Tragically, the first principle
of the Revolution, the sovereignty of the people, was pitted against the
basic conceptions of catholicity and tradition which Rome considered
fundamental to the very essence of the Church as a spiritual society.
Belatedly, Pius VI condemned the Civil Constitution. The clergy who
refused the oath to it were proscribed, driven into exile, or to a
clandestine ministry, and often into furtive and provocative counter-
revolution. In their turn too, the ‘patriotic clergy’, the Constitutionals
who took the oath, fell foul of the Revolution, especially after it swung
to the left on 10 August 1792. Many resented the relentless demands
made on their conscience: the introduction of the etat civil, the en-
couragement of clerical marriage, the execution of the king. On the
other hand, the revolutionary leaders grew more disillusioned with
the results of the Civil Constitution, which had disrupted the patriotic
cause and issued in schism and public disorder. Breaking point came in
1793. In March came news of the part played by non-juring priests in
the Vendee risings: in July many Constitutionals were involved in the
federalist revolt. So in Jacobin eyes the clergy as a whole seemed dis-
credited as plotters, actual or potential, against the patriotic cause. In
the hysteria of civil war and foreign invasion, fear of non-juring priests
broadened into a general suspicion of the priesthood, and in places
into an attack on Christianity itself.
The causes of the deliberate de-christianisation which began in the
autumn of 1793 are complex. It was not so much a single movement as
a series of movements, or of incidents, often set off by an explosive
local situation or by individual caprice. Reversing the usual sequence of
political events, the first systematic campaign began, not in Paris but in
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the provinces, where a pattern for violent iconoclasm was set by the
representatives on mission, most notably Fouche in the Nievre. Helped
by troops and local patriots, the representatives stopped the mass,
desecrated churches, executed captive non-jurors, and browbeat priests
into apostasy or the semi-apostasy of enforced marriage. Christian
worship was replaced by a Cult of Reason and the Republic. After the
famous Feast of Reason in Notre Dame de Paris (9 November 1793) the
campaign was taken up by the Paris sections, with prompting from the
bourgeois anti-clericals of the Commune. As sensational as the violent
dechristianisation of the Commune was the legislative dechristianisation
of the Convention. The ancient clerical monopoly of education was
swept away, and in October 1793 France deliberately broke with her
religious past when the Convention voted the most anti-Christian act
of the Revolution, the replacement of the ancient Gregorian calendar,
woven intricately into the whole cycle of national life, by the new
calendar of the Revolution (Appendix, pp. 691-2).
To Catholic historians, dechristianisation has appeared largely as a
work of sheer destruction. Certainly, its negative side was uppermost
in the grim horseplay of Paris sansculottes, parading before the bar of
the Convention in looted vestments; in the ribaldry of Hebert’s journal
Pere Duchesne which encouraged them; in some of the proconsular
iconoclasm of the representatives, among them ex-priests who destroyed
with the joyful ferocity of the apostate. But even in its destructive
aspects, dechristianisation was more than a simple Saturnalia of
impiety. Its roots lay deep in the group psychology of revolutionary
patriotism, in the siege mentality of France hemmed in by foreign
armies and distracted by fear of internal treachery. Aulard has described
the early dechristianisation as an ‘expedient of national defence’. 1
A good deal of the destruction was the work of troops moving along
the great military routes to the front, or of detachments of the irregular
‘revolutionary armies’, trying to overawe a hostile rural population by
sudden, dramatic acts of terrorism. Here dechristianisation was not so
much a rationalistic attack on Christian symbolism and dogma as a
drastic effort to restore public order and counter the propaganda of
dissident refractory priests. Again, behind some of the sacrilege lay the
military and economic crisis. Church ornaments were stripped away as
‘baubles of fanaticism’, but also as treasure for the mint. Church bells
were cut down to be melted as gun-metal in the foundries, and it was in
search of them that patriots in the summer of 1793 clashed with outraged
worshippers and lost their awe for the sanctuary.
Beside the destructive aim of dechristianisation lay also a positive
purpose. The Jacobin leaders sought not only to destroy Christianity,
but to replace it by a cult more congruous to the needs of the beleaguered
1 A. Aulard, Christianity and the French Revolution, Eng. trans. (London, 1927), p. 122.
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Revolution. Since the work of Mathiez there has been a deeper under-
standing of the succession of revolutionary cults which, as substitutes
for Catholicism, continued to the Concordat. 1 Through them all ran a
common purpose, the provision of a solemn focus for patriotism. Like
the men of the old regime, so the Revolutionaries believed in the
necessity of a system of national morale, to preserve unity and prevent
a glissade into immorality. The cults were to some extent artificial
creations. Yet, claimed Mathiez, their basis was none the less religious
if one accepted (with Durkheim) that society, as well as God, could be
the object of a truly religious adoration. Their concern was not the
transcendental religion of Christianity, but a new social ideology of
justice and fraternity to be realised on earth, the dream of eighteenth-
century philosophers which the Revolution sought to transform into
political reality. The cults were attempts — somewhat improvised — to
replace Catholicism, with its super-natural frame of reference, by a
secular religion of humanity which, in various forms, runs through the
subsequent history of Europe. Since the Federations of 1790 there had
arisen a spontaneous patriotic cult, at first side by side with the old
faith, then in opposition to it. It had its credo in the Declaration of the
Rights of Man, its priesthood in the lawgivers, its baptismal ceremonies
in the civic oaths administered at ‘altars of the patrie', its symbols in the
cockade, tricolour and cap of liberty, its hymns, processions and
calendar. From its various festivals evolved the revolutionary cults of
1793-1802, organised after the eclipse of the Constitutional Church.
In the Cult of Reason (November 1793 to spring 1794) worship of the
revolutionary Republic was primary; philosophical rationalism and the
worship of nature and reason were secondary. If frivolity marked the
beginning of the cults in Paris, in the provinces they were often cele-
brated with gravity. It was in no spirit of mockery that bourgeois
maidens officiated as goddesses of reason, or the Besangon Jacobins
despatched twelve apostles to propagate the new Gospel. The brief
Cult of the Supreme Being inaugurated by Robespierre’s report of
18 Floreal an II (7 May 1794) marked a reaction from the aridity of the
Cult of Reason and the violent methods of some of its initiators, but
did not differ essentially from it. Robespierre intended to create a more
unified, aesthetically satisfying form of worship which could rally dis-
heartened patriots, and provide a bridge between theists. Catholic and
non-Catholic, in which ‘without constraint, without persecution, all
sects can coalesce in the universal Religion of Nature’. While the
Supreme Being worshipped in the spectacular festivals of 20 Prairial
resembled the god of Rousseau’s vicaire Savoyard, in the eyes of his new
pontiff he was also the sanction for revolutionary justice, civic morale
and patriotic obligation. Atheism, Robespierre declared, was ‘aristo-
1 A. Mathiez, Les Origines des Cultes re volutionnaires (Paris, 1904).
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cratic’; worship of the Supreme Being was ‘social’ and ‘republican’.
Only men believing in Providence and immortality could be nerved to
‘greater devotion to the patrie, greater daring in braving tyranny’.
The patriotic religion continued after Thermidor in the official cult of
the Decadi. But as the fires of patriotism burned lower, enthusiasm
faded. The devotees of the cults had been largely drawn from a
minority group of enlightened bourgeois and officials. Here and there
the petit peuple fused the old religion and the new in a martyr cult, like
that of Perrine Dugue of the Sarthe, a Republican martyr seen rising to
heaven on tricoloured wings, or in the more organised cult of the trinity
of Republican martyrs, Marat, Chalier and Lepeletier. But for the
uneducated the rationalism of the national cults was too cold, their
didactic sermons and classical symbolism too abstract. Only the
occasional pomp of orations, festivals and processions stirred the
popular imagination. But if dechristianisation failed to provide an
organised alternative to the old religion, it had dealt it a cruel blow.
Religious indifference spread in parishes bereft of priests to celebrate
mass and educate the children. To peasant communities, the disloca-
tion of traditional habits was probably more disturbing than the impact
of new ideas. Open disbelief, previously confined to aristocracy and
bourgeoisie, took deep root among the lower classes. The suspension
of recruitment to the priesthood was a grave handicap from which
the French Church was slow to recover.
After Thermidor, governmental hostility to Christianity did not cease.
But pressure from public opinion allowed a widespread thaw, and
religious fife revived in many parishes. In the west, generals and
representatives on mission trying to pacify the rebels were forced
locally to sanction religious liberty, thus creating a precedent which
could be extended to France as a whole. In a series of decrees between
September 1794 and September 1795 the Convention brought about the
separation of Church and State in France. The State was no longer to
pay for any cult; freedom of worship was to be maintained, though
severely controlled; churches not already alienated (while remaining the
property of the Communes) might be used by associations of private
citizens for public worship ; ministers of religion were to take an oath of
submission to the laws of the Republic. In uneasy rotation, churches
might now be shared by Constitutionals, by officials celebrating the
cult of the Decadi, by those Catholics willing to take the new oath or
by devotees of small eclectic cults like Theophilanthropy.
The Separation of 1794-1802 marked an interesting experiment in
European church-state relations. It invites comparison with the more
permanent system created a few years earlier in the United States, where
article VI of the Constitution had prohibited religious tests for federal
office, and the First Amendment provided that ‘Congress shall make
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no laws respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof’. Both systems were influenced, to some extent, by the
incompatibility of religious intolerance with a natural rights philosophy
of freedom and equality, and by the problem of maintaining dogmatic
uniformity in a pluralist society. But the differences between the
two systems are perhaps more striking than the similarities, and show
how flexible is the term ‘separation of church and state’. In the
United States separation rested on mutual trust between government
and the Christian denominations, and was in fact consonant with a
good deal of benevolent recognition of religion by state and federal
governments: in the provision of public funds for army chaplains, for
instance; in tax-exemption for property used for religious purposes; or
in various state laws against blasphemy. But in France the attitude of
Thermidorians and Directory was generally one of ill-concealed
hostility. Separation was not inspired primarily by a precocious
enthusiasm for laicite, the idea cherished by many nineteenth-century
liberals of the strict neutrality of the state to all religious faiths. France
had in fact made strides towards laicite since 1789, notably with the in-
troduction in 1792 of civil marriage and divorce, setting against the
sacramental Catholic conception of marriage as a perpetual union the
secular idea of marriage as a revocable civil contract. But in general
the revolutionary leaders remained men of their century, absorbed by the
old idea of a national cult and the omnipotence of the state in religious
affairs. Separation was a counsel of despair, ‘a policy of resignation’,
summed up in the phrase of one of its architects, ‘keep an eye on what
you cannot prevent.’ 1 Since Catholicism could be neither revolu-
tionised (by the Civil Constitution), nor eradicated (by dechristianisa-
tion), then it must be tolerated, yet tolerated so grudgingly that it would
not regain its old dominance, but could be slowly eliminated from the
conscience of the nation. In the eyes of the civil law the denominations
possessed no corporate existence: they were unable to receive endow-
ments, and hindered from forming a properly articulated national
organisation. Harsh laws against the non-jurors remained on the statute
book, though often laxly applied, particularly when the Directory, in its
‘see-saw policy’, felt the need for support from the right. But in 1797
the coup d'etat of Fructidor unleashed a persecution which has been
compared to that of the Terror. Thereafter, a determined attempt was
made to revive the languishing cult of the Decadi. The Decadi (tenth
day) was enforced as a day of rest, and its glacial ceremonies were
declared compulsory for teachers and schoolchildren, and for municipal
officials, who marched to them in uniform, often accompanied by a
band. But the campaign proved hard to carry out (especially in the
country) and brought the Directory into conflict with the Constitutionals,
1 A. Mathiez, La Reaction Thermidorienne (Paris, 1929), p. 181.
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unwilling to abandon Monsieur Dimanche in his battle with Citoyen
Decadi.
If the Directory was reluctant to carry out separation in a spirit of
calm neutrality, so were many of the clergy. A majority of the non-
jurors — their ranks swelled by thousands of exiles returning when
persecution slackened before Fructidor — refused to regard it as a viable
system. Many preached blatant counter-revolution, praying for the
royal family, anathematising owners of biens nationaux, and in some
rural areas fomenting a virtual White Terror. A minority group, how-
ever, led by the saintly Monsieur Emery, superior-general of St Sulpice,
tried to disentangle the cause of Catholicism from that of the Bourbons.
Between the two sections of the Catholic clergy a deep rift appeared
(similar to that over Ralliement a century later) as they faced up to the
thorny problem of obedience to a revolutionary and non-Christian
government. Naturally, the argument revolved round the successive
oaths of allegiance demanded of the clergy. While the oath to the Civil
Constitution had been solemnly and officially condemned by Rome,
this was not the case with the subsequent oaths. The intransigents, or
insoumissionnaires, taking orders from their emigre bishops, refused all
the oaths. How could they countenance usurpers, or give inclusive
obedience to a political system which maintained laws profoundly
hostile to Catholic teaching? Better organise France as a pays de
mission, better maintain a clandestine cult, than share altars publicly
with infidels and schismatics. On the other hand the soumissionnaires
accepted most of the later oaths (though many held back from the
oath of ‘hatred to royalty’ exacted after Fructidor). How else could the
Catholic religion be kept alive, and the Roman priesthood compete
with the Constitutional, save by claiming the right to celebrate mass
publicly by taking the oath? Emery distinguished between active and
passive obedience, between approbation of laws and a mere submission,
limited, in so far as it concerned religion, to a promise not to disturb
the public order. Until the eve of the Concordat, the polemic between
the two Catholic parties approached the verge of schism. The old
Gallican Church was fragmented into not two but three hostile groups.
Before 1795 the Revolution had threatened the existence of the
Roman Church in France and Belgium. When it spilled over into the
Italian peninsula it threatened to engulf the heart of Catholicism itself.
In February 1797, under the Treaty of Tolentino, France detached the
Legations from the Papal States: the murder of General Duphot in
Rome in December led to the occupation of the city by General Berthier
in February 1798, and to the proclamation of a Roman Republic. In
1799 ‘citizen pope’, Pius YI, was removed to captivity in France, where
his death at Valence seemed to portend the dissolution of the Papacy.
Yet within two years, to the astonishment of Europe, Revolution
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compounded with Papacy in the signing of the French Concordat on
15 July 1801. How had this come about? The way had been cleared
by the advent to power of two new leaders in Paris and Rome: Bona-
parte, who became first consul in 1799, and Cardinal Chiaramonti,
elected as Pope Pius VII on 14 March 1800 by the Conclave of Venice.
As Bishop of Imola, Chiaramonti had shown himself prepared to co-
operate with the Cisalpine Republic, and in a famous ‘Jacobin’ homily
at Christmas 1797 had told his flock ‘be good Christians and you will
be good democrats’: as Pope, his appointment of Cardinal Consalvi
as secretary of state portended a new and more liberal regime. But the
initiative for the rapprochement came from Bonaparte. Though no
devot — ‘his whole credo,’ wrote Frederic Masson, ‘was confined to a
fatalist spiritualism in which his star took the place of Providence’ — as a
political realist he appreciated the hold of the traditional religion on
the masses, and its value as a guarantee of social order, reconciling
men to inequality, and inclining them to obey the worldly regiment. 1
Napoleon’s task of pacification and reconciliation required a religious
peace, to heal the bitter divisions among the French clergy, to ease the
incorporation into the French frontiers of Rhenish Catholics and
fiercely Ultramontane Belgians and to prepare the path for French
hegemony in Italy. The history of the previous decade showed luridly
the failure of attempting to solve the religious question unilaterally,
without consulting the Papacy. For diplomatic purposes Napoleon
might threaten to follow the example of Henry VIII of England. But
he could not create a Protestant France, and saw little gain in re-
establishing the Constitutional Church, which was weak in popular
influence and in any case subordinate to his control. He could continue
the Separation — but this would do little to resolve the quarrels among
the clergy, and did not accord with his authoritarian spirit. France
remained basically Catholic. But if Catholicism was indestructible,
so too were the permanent gains of the Revolution. The French clergy
must therefore be compelled to recognise the loss of their privileged
position under the old order, to concede the inexorable advances made
by the etat laique, such as divorce, civil marriage and religious equality:
they must accept the inalienability of the secularised church property:
above all they must be detached from the Bourbons. In a crisp, military
appreciation of the situation Napoleon remarked ‘A religion is necessary
for the people. This religion must be in the hands of the government.
Fifty emigre bishops in the pay of England lead the French clergy today.
We must destroy their influence. The authority of the Pope is necessary
for that’. 2
1 Quoted in J. Leflon, La Crise Revolutionnaire (Paris, 1949), p. 175.
8 Boulay de la Meurthe, Documents sur la Negociation du Concordat (Paris, 1891-7),
vol. m, p. 50.
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Wit hin days of the victory of Marengo, which gave him the political
security he needed, Napoleon opened negotiations with the Curia.
The new Pope was prepared for many sacrifices to restore the freedom
of Catholic altars in France, ‘eldest daughter’ of the Church. Yet there
were months of hard bargaining, several diplomatic crises and many
draft projects before the Concordat was signed. In several ways the
new Concordat resembled its predecessor of 1516. But Rome had
negotiated the Concordat of 1516 with a Catholic monarch at the head
of a solidly confessional state: the new Concordat was the result of
barter between two strange powers linked by no real spiritual bond.
The Curia did not seek to consecrate the Revolution but to limit its
results. The medieval church-state was gone. This emerged most
clearly in the article dealing with the status of Catholicism in France.
Rome fought hard for recognition of her Church as the ‘dominant’
religion of the State (which implied the legal inferiority of other creeds).
But she was compelled to accept the mere recognition of Catholicism
as ‘the religion of the majority of Frenchmen’. She renounced her
claims for the restitution of alienated Church property, accepting re-
luctantly in return the payment of bishops and some of the clergy by
state salary instead of by the endowment which would have restored a
measure of their old financial independence. Freedom of worship was
guaranteed — but subjected (in a dangerously vague clause) to police
regulations. For his part, Napoleon gained the old regalian prerogative
of nominating bishops, whose canonical institution was reserved to the
Pope; the diocesan map of France was redrawn; the clergy were ordered
to pray for the government and take an oath of obedience and fidelity
to it. The bishops were to nominate the cures , subject to government
approval, and both were to be salaried by the state. To allow the re-
construction of the Church, a tabula rasa was made of both episcopates,
Catholic and Constitutional. Gently but firmly, the papal bull Tam
Multa demanded the resignation of the Catholic bishops. A majority
submitted — but a substantial minority refused, and their sees were
declared by Rome to be vacant. This was a terrible blow to the Gallican
tradition that bishops held their sees by divine right from Christ, not as
revocable offices held by grace from an absolute Pope. The wholesale
deprivation of an episcopate had no historical precedent. An act of
Papal sovereignty, it marked an important step towards the triumphant
Ultramontanism of the Vatican Council of 1870.
The law of 18 Germinal an X (8 April 1802) which promulgated the
Concordat, also contained a number of Organic Articles, a detailed
code of regulation which severely limited the freedom of the Church.
By it, Napoleon hoped to check Ultramontane encroachment and to
reassert the political Gallicanism of the old regime. Communication
between the French clergy and Rome was restricted, and a chain of
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control was forged which ran from the government through the
episcopate to the lower clergy, many of whom were now removable
from their posts at the will of their bishop. Organic Articles were also
issued for the Reformed and Lutheran churches, controlled, established
and (for the most part) subsidised on a basis of parity with the Roman,
and transformed from their traditional role of persecuted opposition
into docile supporters of the government. The religious equality pro-
claimed by the Revolution was thus maintained, not (as after Thermidor)
by separating all confessions from the state, but by the contrary method
of affording to the major confessions a similar state establishment. The
belief that ecclesiastical uniformity was essential for the political stability
of a state was openly abandoned. Speaking to the Corps Legislatif,
Portalis, Napoleon’s spokesman on religious affairs, cheerfully accepted
the death of the old confessional state. Provided (and it was an all
important proviso) the different churches were strictly subordinated to
governmental control, the existence of diverse confessions encouraged a
healthy rivalry in the national service. ‘The essential for public order
and morality is not that all men should have the same religion, but that
every man should be attached to his own.’ 1
Beneath the keen eye of the minister of ecclesiastical affairs ( des
Cultes), the churches of France lay down together in unprecedented
tranquillity. The fusion of former non-jurors and Constitutionals went
on apace, and as minister Portalis did his best to achieve a fair partition
of parishes between the two groups and to prevent the victimisation of
the old ‘patriotic clergy’. To Rome’s dismay, twelve former Consti-
tutionals were among the sixty bishops nominated to the new dioceses,
several of them very tardy in formally disavowing the schism of the
Civil Constitution. But the bishops were soon absorbed in the urgent
tasks of diocesan reconstruction. With a dutifulness that earned them
the nickname of ‘prefects in violet’, they accepted their role as pillars of
the Napoleonic system. They extolled the ‘new Cyrus’, the ‘second
Constantine’ who had brought order out of chaos and restored the
altars. In 1806 they accepted, with little hesitation, both a new Imperial
Catechism urging obedience to the emperor in exaggerated terms, and
a new saint’s day, the festival of St Napoleon, a more than shadowy
martyr of Diocletian’s persecution, celebrated on 15 August, birthday
of the emperor and Feast of the Assumption.
While restoration continued in France, the Catholic Church in
Germany — perhaps the richest of all in 1789 — suffered huge losses. By
the Recess of the Diet of Ratisbon in 1803 the secular princes dis-
possessed by France of territory on the left bank of the Rhine were
compensated, largely at the expense of the ecclesiastical states of the
Empire. In the secularisation that followed, the ancient prince-
1 Boulay de la Meurthe, op. cit., vol. v, p. 387.
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bishoprics and a multitude of convents and abbeys lost their inde-
pendence, engulfed largely by Protestant states, although Catholic
Austria and Bavaria shared in the spoils. Not only was territory
secularised. While parish churches were spared, the goods of religious
houses were widely sequestrated, and with them vanished many of the
schools they supported. Of the fifteen Catholic universities existing in
1789, only five Catholic theological faculties still remained in 1815.
Austria refrained from this kind of spoliation, but not Bavaria, where
monastic libraries were sold by paper-weight as cheese paper and the
cathedral of Freising was auctioned for a time to a local butcher. 1803
marked an epoch in church-state relations in Germany. Firstly, as
the clergy of the old Church States fell suddenly under the yoke of the
civil power, and found themselves regimented by authoritarian Pro-
testant princes, or by Josephist officials in Austria and Bavaria, they
began to turn, like the Gallicans of France, to Rome for protection and
guidance. ‘Febronianism,’ the German version of episcopal Gallica-
nism, began to give ground to Ultramontanism. Secondly, the simplifica-
tion of German political geography between 1803 and 1815 further
undermined the crumbling principle of cuius regio eius religio. States
once predominantly Protestant, like Baden, Wurttemberg, Nassau and
Hesse, became confessionally mixed, as did Bavaria in absorbing many
Protestants, who numbered now a quarter of her population. Under
these conditions it became impossible to maintain the old confessional
state. Here, as previously in Prussia, religious pluralism probably
proved a stronger incentive to religious liberty than liberal political
theories. The old debate over the toleration of dissenters gave way to
the struggle for parity between the confessions. In theory — though
not always in practice — the principle of religious equality gained
increasing acceptance.
The immense upheaval in Germany called out for a settlement with
Rome. But attempts to frame an inclusive German Concordat failed,
as did later plans for a Concordat for the Confederation of the Rhine.
In Northern Italy the restoration of religious peace at first went more
smoothly. In 1803 a Concordat was signed between Rome and the
Italian Republic, on the broad lines of the French Concordat, though,
to Consalvi’s joy, more favourable to Catholicism. But if Napoleon
had set the pattern for agreements with the Curia, he had also created
a precedent for their evasion. When the text of the Concordat was pub-
lished, it was accompanied by the Melzi Decrees, a more stringent
version of the Organic Articles, some of them in flat contradiction to the
terms of the agreement.
The officiation of the Pope at Napoleon’s magnificent imperial
coronation in Notre Dame (2 December 1804) seemed to seal the
entente between Rome and Paris. Not since the eighth century was there
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any precedent for this spectacular blessing bestowed on a political
regime: even Charlemagne had travelled to Rome to be crowned. But
the entente was more fragile than it appeared. Pius VII had accepted
the invitation to Paris with much hesitation and in the hope of bargain-
ing for some of the urgent aims of curial diplomacy: repeal of the
Organic Articles and Melzi Decrees, restoration of the Legations, and
of Catholicism as the dominant religion of France. But months of
strenuous negotiation had brought little reward. While the Curia felt
outmanoeuvred and frustrated, Napoleon’s dazzling diplomatic coup
encouraged his dangerous optimism about the pliancy of the Pope.
Within a few months, the precarious concord was shattered. In
October 1805 French troops occupied the papal port of Ancona. It
was an abrupt move. The Pope’s choleric letter of complaint — reaching
Napoleon shortly before Austerlitz — threatened to break off diplomatic
relations, and its apparently sudden change of tone was interpreted by
Napoleon as an unscrupulous attempt to make capital out of his military
difficulties. A sharp diplomatic exchange followed. In February 1806
Napoleon demanded the closure of the Papal ports to enemies of
France, and the expulsion of their citizens from Rome. The Pope
refused. Diplomatic attitudes stiffened on both sides. When much of
Italy was parcelled out into fiefs of the Grand Empire in the spring of
1806, the political position of the Papal States grew precarious, but not
until after Tilsit was Napoleon bold enough to dismember them, and
then only piecemeal. Rome was occupied in February 1 808 ; the Marches
were then annexed; in May 1809 the Papal States were assimilated to
the Empire, and on 10 June the Papal flag was hauled down from the
St Angelo, and the tricolour run up. ‘We see plainly that the French
have a mind to force us to speak Latin,’ remarked the Pope grimly to
Pacca, ‘and speak Latin we will.’ The papal bull Quum Memoranda
pronounced major excommunication on all who had dared to commit
sacrilege against the Patrimony of Peter. On 6 July a storming party
under General Radet broke down the doors of the Quirinal with
hatchets and, bundling the Pope into a carriage, rushed him off towards
captivity at Savona.
Napoleon represented the conflict as a disagreement over temporali-
ties which had no organic connection with the spiritual headship of the
Pope. Seen from Paris, this interpretation was convincing enough. The
Italian peninsula — the mistress with whom, Napoleon said, he alone
intended to sleep— was vital to him, not only for his grand strategy in the
Mediterranean and Orient, but for his immediate military security in
the war against the Third Coalition, for his flank could be turned by
Austrian armies on the Venetian plain, or by British naval landings along
the coast. 1 The neutrality of the Papal States threatened the French
1 See A. Latreille, Napoleon et le Saint-Siege, 1801-1808 (Paris, 1935).
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defensive system: they could bar the transit of troops to the south, their
long and ill-defended coastline invited naval attack, and their capital
harboured enemy agents. Therefore they must submit to protection by
the Emperor’s Catholic armies against heretic Britons, schismatic
Russians, and infidel Turks. ‘Your holiness’ insisted Napoleon ‘should
have the same respect for me in the temporal sphere that I have for you
in the spiritual. . . . Your holiness is Sovereign of Rome, but I am its
Emperor. All my enemies must be yours.’ If the Pope allowed his king-
dom to become a French protectorate, no conflict need arise.
But the Pope’s view was radically different. What Napoleon saw as
political readjustment, Rome saw as sacrilege. Napoleon’s case rested
on a sharp delimitation of the temporal from the spiritual aspects of the
Papal government: Pius VII’s was based on an adamant belief in their
inseparability. Like his successors, Pius VII insisted that the temporal
power had a spiritual function. As he put it in Quum Memoranda,
‘the liberty of the apostolic see . . . is bound up with the liberty and
immunities of the universal church.’ The territorial integrity of the
Papal monarchy was a guarantee of her spiritual freedom, and her
political neutrality a symbol of her spiritual universality. The head of a
Church with a supra-national mission could never be subject to a single
nation, nor a Catholic Church be contained within a single empire, even
a so-called Empire of the West. Renaissance popes had warred like
secular princes, but Pius VII took seriously his claim to represent on
earth the God of Peace. To join the French confederation would com-
promise the communications of the Holy See with millions of Catholics
in lands ranged against France. Furthermore, Napoleon himself, by
his quasi-historical claims to be the inheritor of Charlemagne, the
‘Emperor of Rome’ from whom the Pope held his lands as a sort of
revocable fief, had at an early stage raised the whole debate from the
level of temporary military necessity to high levels of principle. Rome for
her part could not ignore the religious innovations which followed in the
wake of French political expansion in Italy — extension of the Concordat,
and with it the Code Civil and religious liberty for dissidents, even civil
marriage and divorce. What was deplorable in France, cradle of the
Revolution, seemed intolerable in Italy, special preserve of the Papacy.
With the abduction of the Pope, the conflict entered a new phase as
Napoleon made an improvised attempt to turn Paris into the spiritual
as well as the temporal capital of his Empire. Almost all the Sacred
College was transported to Paris, many cardinals were installed in
hotels on the Left Bank, and offered a pension which most accepted:
after them followed stacks of the pontifical archives, laboriously hauled
over the Mont Cenis pass in winter. A large sum was earmarked for the
erection of a Papal palace near Notre Dame. But the Pope obstinately
refused to accept the role intended for him as imperial chaplain.
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The weapons at his disposal were few, but far from negligible, and
Napoleon seriously miscalculated the disparity between the political
feebleness of the Papal States, with their antiquated administration of
elderly cardinals, and the immense moral influence commanded by the
Holy See. The Pope’s Latin had at first disappointingly little effect on
the emperor, for, as Gallican lawyers and prelates pointed out, the ex-
communication did not mention him by name. But the imprisoned Pope
had a more effective weapon: he could refuse to grant bulls of institution
to the bishops nominated by the emperor, and so paralyse the Con-
cordats. In 1806 he began to apply this sanction in Italy, in 1808 it was
extended to France, by 1811 twenty-seven Imperial sees lacked bishops,
and a new form of Investiture Controversy shook the fabric of the
Imperial Church. The cost in ecclesiastical disorder was considerable,
and most visible in the vulnerable extremities of the Empire. Hundreds
of Italian priests were exiled for refusing the oaths of obedience to the
emperor, Spanish clergy leavened the guerrilla movement (particularly
after Joseph Bonaparte dissolved the mendicant and regular orders in
1809), and the Belgians proved so fractious that one gloomy prefect
suggested that two-thirds of their priests be transported and replaced
by tractable Frenchmen from the Midi.
Over the French hierarchy, however, Napoleon kept a remarkable
hold. The vital years of peace between the Concordat and the Pope’s
imprisonment had brought their reward. While Ultramontane ideas,
fanned by secret societies, began to percolate among the lower clergy,
the bishops were unwilling, by open opposition, to undo their patient
work of diocesan reconstruction. Yet post-revolutionary Gallicanism
was moderate and conditional, characterised by a deep sense of the role
of the papacy as the bond of Catholic unity and by dread of any return to
a schism like that of the Civil Constitution. This emerged clearly when
in 1809 and 18 11 Napoleon consulted two small Ecclesiastical Councils
on problems raised by his quarrel with the Pope. They gave qualified
support to Napoleon’s interpretation of the conflict. The Pope had
declared no canonical reasons for withholding institution from bishops
irreproachable in their conduct and doctrines. The loss of the temporal
power constituted no cause in itself, for the slow accretion of the Papal
States had been of human institution, and what man had given man
could take away. If the Pope continued to desolate the sees of the
Imperial Church, the law of necessity might permit a reversion to the
tradition of former ages — including the Pragmatic Sanction of 1438 —
by which confirmation of an election was conferred not by papal bull
but by the Metropolitan or by a provincial council. But the Councils
expressed quite firmly their perplexity at the conflict of allegiance which
they faced, stressing their devotion to the Holy See, and beseeching that
the Holy Father be set at liberty.
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By the summer of 1810 Napoleon still faced his unresolved dilemma:
should he leave his sees bereft of bishops, or fill them with pastors lack-
ing canonical jurisdiction? If the latter, how could it be done without
schism ? Provisionally he might — like Louis XIV in his battle over the
regale — prevail on diocesan chapters to instal his episcopal nominees
as vicars capitular of their sees. This gave them an administrative
authority, though not the power to confirm and ordain. There was
dramatic resistance to Napoleon’s move in the important sees of Paris
and Florence, stiffened by clandestine papal briefs, though soon crushed.
The emperor’s ecclesiastical advisers had suggested the addition to the
Concordat of a clause by which, after a delay of six months by the
Pope, institution might be conferred by the Metropolitan or eldest
suffragan. But how could the Pope be induced to agree ? A display of
Gallican solidarity, appealing to the historic theory of the authority of
councils, might perhaps overawe him. On 17 June 1811 a grandiose
National Council attended at its opening by ninety-five ‘Fathers’ of the
Imperial Church, mostly French and Italian, assembled in Notre Dame
de Paris. But in conclave the bishops showed a collective bravery that
sadly disappointed the emperor’s plans. The opening sermon from the
Bishop of Troyes spoke feelingly of the Council’s attachment to the
Holy See, severed from which the episcopate would be a withered
branch cut off from the trunk of catholicity. Led by Cardinal Fesch,
the emperor’s uncle, the members took an oath of obedience to the
imprisoned Pope. To Napoleon’s fury, the Committee delegated to
study the question of episcopal institution declared the Council in-
competent to regulate the matter without recourse to the Pope. The
Council was dissolved, and the leaders of the obstinate Committee
imprisoned at Vincennes. Separately, however, the imperial bishops
were not so daring. As Cardinal Maury pleasantly observed, wine that
was not good in cask might be better in bottle. Pressed individually,
most of the bishops recognised the competence of the Council to transfer
the right of institution after six months’ delay. Reassembled in August
to register this decree, the Council did so, but with the proviso that it be
submitted to the approval of the Pope.
So Napoleon was driven back to his second method of dealing with
Pius VII. Weakened, or, as Napoleon nicely put it, ‘ripened’ by captivity
and isolation from his counsellors, the Pope might be argued and bullied
into submission or at least into compromise. Spied on by his doctor,
possibly drugged on occasion, kept carefully ill-informed of affairs in
the world outside, he was harassed by a succession of diplomatic
missions in which plaintive prelates harped on the chaos into which he
was plunging the Church. But the monastic training of Pius VII made
him less vulnerable to imprisonment than the emperor hoped, and at
Savona he reverted easily to the simple routine of his early life as ‘the
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poor monk Chiaramonti’, celebrating mass, meditating, mending his
clothes and washing the snuff off his dressing-gown. Beyond the question
of the Temporal Power and the ‘six months clause’ he sensed the
magnitude of the issue at stake: the right of the Church to a free
existence as a societas perfecta, obeying ends, governed by laws,
which were spiritual and distinct from those of the secular regiment. At
times he weakened dangerously, debilitated by illness and uncertainty.
In May 181 1 he agreed to certain outline concessions, which he immedi-
ately retracted; in September, pressed by a ‘holy caravan’ of prelates
from the National Council, he signed concessions which Napoleon
recklessly rejected; in 1813, at Fontainebleau, after an extraordinary
tete-a-tete with Napoleon — to whose magnetism he was curiously
susceptible — he agreed to a so-called Concordat, which he soon repudi-
ated. But when Pius was almost at the end of his tether, Napoleon’s
military defeat released him from his lonely ordeal. From the long
drawn-out, personal clash of wills the Pope’s obstinate Ultramontanism
emerged unconquered by the emperor’s determined Caesaropapism.
There were signs by 1815 of a religious awakening in many parts of
Europe. Doctrinally, most of the religious reaction flowed in strongly
traditional channels. Yet there were several important attempts to re-
interpret Christianity to the European intellectual elite, which had
largely lapsed from the faith. Old methods of apologetic had made
little impression. The main problem, as Chateaubriand remarked, was
no longer that of meeting deviations from orthodoxy, but challenging
sceptical indifference. Traditional conceptions of revelation — on which
most earlier apologetic had rested — seemed widely discredited by the
Enlightenment. The revelation of the Bible was widely held to be the
disclosure of what was actually or potentially knowable by reason: a
republication, more or less useful, of natural religion. Miracles, once
pointed to as convincing ‘evidences’ of Christianity, now appeared as
difficulties needing explanation, incompatible with the uniformity of
nature increasingly revealed by science. Meanwhile, old ‘proofs’ of
God’s existence, like the ontological proof, or that from design, were
compromised by Hume, and still more fundamentally by Kant. New
lines of defence were clearly necessary, even fresh interpretations of the
working of revelation. Dissimilar as Chateaubriand, Schleiermacher
and Lamennais were in their method of approach, each tried to apply to
theology the vocabulary of Romanticism, to present his faith in a fresh
light that would strike the imagination, and to show the educated classes
that they had rejected Christianity because they had misunderstood its
nature or its value. They would force the indifferent ‘to examine
seriously what they have hitherto despised in ignorance. That is all we
ask of them. We do not say to them believe but examine'} A new
1 F. de Lamennais, Essai Sur V Indifference (Paris, 1817-23). Introduction.
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generation of defenders, influenced by the discovery of the sense of
history and development, or by ideas of divine immanence made
prominent by Schelling and Hegel, sought to show the Church not as a
defunct relic of barbarism, but as a living organism; religion not as
antiquated superstition, but as an expression of life, integral to man’s
individual psyche or to his social well-being; doctrine not as a static,
timeless set of propositions declared once and for all in the Protestant’s
Bible, or the Catholic’s tradition, but as a progressive, developing
revelation in history.
Through Romanticism the Roman Church found new defenders in a
realm which for a century or more had been usually hostile, the world
of literature and the arts. Strikingly, her chief apologists (with some
great exceptions like Lamennais and Mohler) were not her priests but
laymen, often converts from scepticism or Protestantism: a novelist
like Manzoni, a political writer like de Maistre, a journalist like Joseph
Gorres, artists like the colony of German ‘Nazarenes’ at Rome, who
spurned the classical, heathen imagery of the Rococo and Baroque for
the religious symbolism of the medieval masters. In Catholicism many
Romantics found symbols for the imagination, and an outlet for
emotions starved by the Enlightenment and stirred by the catastrophes
of the Revolution. Chateaubriand’s Genie du Christianisme (1802)
heralded an aesthetic approach to religion which, despite its super-
ficiality, bridged the gap between a sentimental Deism and a senti-
mental Catholicism, and directed the man of feeling away from Rousseau
to Rome, from a vague heart-religion towards the dogmatic structure of
the Catholic Church. His conversion from Stoic scepticism had been a
matter of emotion not of ratiocination: ‘I wept and I believed.’ His
apologetic aim was to reveal Catholicism not as a cold official cult, but
as a living religion of mystery, beauty, pathos and poetry, the matrix
of European civilisation and art. Elsewhere, particularly in the school
of German Romanticism which followed Novalis, the longing for social
unity led to an idealisation of the Middle Ages as an epoch of simple
faith and spiritual unity, with a flourishing corporate social structure of
guilds, orders and Estates, under the benign guidance of Church and
Empire. The traditionalists — like Bonald, de Maistre and Lamennais
— were also concerned (in different ways) to show the value rather than
the truth of religion. Catholicism was declared to be necessary to
society. Touching man’s inner will while secular authority affected
only his external conduct, it provided a basis for moral and political
obligation in a society terribly fragmented by the individualism of the
Enlightenment and the anarchy of the Revolution. Bonald remained a
Gallican, but de Maistre and Lamennais united their traditionalism
with a new Ultramontanism, resting not so much on doctrinal proofs as
on the need for social order and unity. Episcopal Gallicanism, they
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argued, with its theory that the ultimate authority of the Church lay in
an aristocratic General Council of bishops, bred schism and disunity.
In Du Pape (1819) de Maistre stressed by analogy the absolute necessity
of sovereignty in the spiritual as in the temporal sphere: it was as
dangerous to concede the supremacy of a Council over a Pope as to
permit a States-General to control a King. Lamennais argued that
political Gallicanism with its demand for the separation of temporal
government from spiritual guidance, removed princes from the restraint
of divine law, and hence led to despotism. In a time which produced
several wistful projects for a European federation that might preserve
peace and order, the new Ultramontanes could show the Pope as the
key-stone of a Christian polity which could resolve the antithesis
between liberty and order. He was the rightful and necessary arbiter of
Christendom. ‘Without the Pope’ ran Lamennais’s famous aphorism,
‘no Church; without the Church no Christianity, without Christianity
... no society.’
Catholic theological studies were at a low ebb by 1815. The Revolu-
tion had disrupted much seminary life; the old scholasticism was in
decline; the new Cartesian apologetic, though popular, seemed limited
by its effort to meet rationalism on its own ground. Lamennais opened
up one fruitful avenue of thought by the application of traditionalist
ideas to theology in his Essat sur V Indifference (1817-23). He derided
the claim that the individual reason could arrive at religious certitude:
only in the authoritative general reason of mankind, the sensus com-
munis which transmitted from generation to generation, through
tradition, the primal revelation of God to society, could certitude be
found. Developed theologically by followers such as Bautain, the
philosophy of the sensus communis encouraged a type of Fideism, a
depreciation of the role of reason in religion, which earned the rebuke
of Rome. Here, as in much romantic Catholicism, the violent reaction
against the Enlightenment went too far: the exaggeration of tradi-
tionalism led to a flight from reason, as romantic medievalism led
often to a flight from a puzzling present to an idealised past. It was in
Germany, where the challenge of Protestant scholarship and idealist
philosophy had to be met, that bolder attempts at theological recon-
struction were made. In contrast to the traditionalists, Professor Georg
Hermes of Bonn (1775-1831), influenced by Kant and Fichte, tried
to provide a more stable intellectual basis for the Roman faith. But
‘Hermesianism’ made ‘positive doubt’ the starting point for religious
enquiry, and assent to the truths of faith the necessary conclusion of a
purely rational demonstration. It was condemned by Rome as semi-
rationalism in 1835. More orthodox were the circles of Catholic
Romanticism in Munster, in Landshut, and at the University of Munich
which by 1830 boasted Gorres in its chair of History, Baader in the chair
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of Speculative Theology, and the young Dollinger in that of Canon Law
and Church History. Perhaps most influential for the future trend of
Roman theology was the faculty of Catholic theology at Tubingen,
where, influenced by Schelling’s philosophy, J. S. Drey and J. A.
Mohler, the author of Symbolism (1832), formulated a theory of dis-
ciplinary and doctrinal development which heralded that of Newman.
The Tubingen Catholic school conceived of their Church not in static
but in dynamic, biological terms, as a living organism, developing,
adapting itself to new historical circumstances, yet ever preserving
through its traditions the essence of the original Christian revelation.
Among Protestants, too, the prolonged European wars, with their
national humiliations and triumphs, excited at least temporarily a moral
fervour and a sense of spiritual need. Patriotic and religious revivals
could support each other: repentance and regeneration were concepts
shared by their vocabulary. The disaster of Jena stirred Prussian clergy
to fervent support of the national revival under Stein. The War of
Liberation was widely preached as a crusade and its battlefields re-
sounded with Protestant chorales. Military disaster was interpreted as
the refining fire through which peoples were brought to reformation, and
victory as divine judgement on a righteous cause. The upheavals of the
age seemed to foreshadow the apocalypse, and encouraged strange
visionaries: the English prophet Richard Brothers; Madame Kriidener,
confidante of Tsar Alexander; Jung-Stilling, whose predictions en-
couraged an exodus of Wiirttemberg millenarians to await the Second
Coming of Christ between the Caspian and the Black Sea.
In the early nineteenth century the Christian rationalism which had
long percolated among most Protestant churches was often checked and
forced to give ground, usually by various forms of evangelical pietism.
The sharp antagonism between pietism and theological liberalism, and
the divorce which it often entailed between depth of piety and depth
of learning, between the traditionally orthodox and those who sought
(often bravely, but sometimes precipitately) to harmonise their faith
with contemporary culture and advancing knowledge, constituted one
of the tragedies of the age. ‘Rational Christianity’ still found many
exponents, and covered a wide spectrum of belief. But there were many
Protestants who felt that the spiritual life had dimensions unfilled by a
religion of mere commonsense, and unexplained by abstract conceptions
of nature and reason. Traditional forms of piety revived. One powerful
element in Protestant revival was a conservative neo-confessionalism,
which looked back nostalgically (sometimes through spectacles tinted
by Romanticism) to the heroic days of the Reformation, and to the
authority of the old doctrinal formulae which the eighteenth century
had ignored, reinterpreted or pushed aside. The tercentenary of the
Reformation in 1817, and of the Augsburg Confession in 1830,
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reminded the Lutheran churches of Germany and Scandinavia that they
were parts of a larger whole, and inheritors of a great religious tradi-
tion. An appeal to the moderate Calvinism in the Thirty Nine Articles
had long been a staple of Anglican Evangelical apologetic: in 1801 it
was systematically set out in John Overton’s True Churchmen Ascer-
tained which claimed, provocatively, that the Evangelicals alone held to
the title-deeds of the Church of England.
This confessionalism was often intertwined with types of pietism.
The comparative history of the many evangelical or pietistic revivals of
the nineteenth century remains to be written, and will be a formidable
task. It is not easy to generalise about types of Protestant spirituality
which — despite a common denominator — varied from quiet mysticism
to lurid hell-fire preaching. Some revivals were safely corralled within a
State Church: others, like the Swedish ‘New Readers’, some con-
gregations in the Genevan Reveil, or the Christian Reformed Church
in Holland, hived off into separatism, despairing of a Laodicean estab-
lishment or a rationalistic clergy. At times a revival could sound a clear
note of social protest, as in Norway, where the rural lay-preachers who
followed Hans Nielsen Hauge were to form the heart of the farmer
opposition bloc against the government officials in the Storting. Else-
where it could be aristocratic and conservative, as among the earn-
est, bible-reading circles of Junkers whom young Bismarck met in
Pomerania, and from whom he drew his bride; or, in its more sectarian
and ascetic forms, politically quietist, channelling its energies into the
intense spiritual life of the self-contained group. Through most revivals,
however, ran a similar stress on the Pauline antinomies of sin and grace.
Law and Gospel ; on the necessity of individual conversion through faith
in the atoning blood of Christ; on sanctification by the Holy Spirit;
on the literal interpretation of the word of God in Scripture. They had
seldom any deep interest in formulating comprehensive metaphysical
systems, but were usually as conspicuously non-intellectual as they were
anti-rationalist. Where revivalism flourished, its emphasis on heart-
religion and on evangelism tended to erode not only the dogmatism but
also the definiteness of systematic theology. In particular, strict Cal-
vinism was steadily moderated and softened. The pessimistic Calvinist
doctrine that only the predestined elect were redeemed was hardly
compatible with the revivalist’s confident offer of salvation to all man-
kind. Among the Reformed Churches of Europe and North America
there were a number of fresh attempts to reconcile the doctrine of God’s
absolute sovereignty with the idea of man’s responsibility, divine pre-
destination with man’s free agency in accepting or rejecting saving grace.
A prominent characteristic of the Protestant revivals was a concern
for ‘practical piety’, expressed in a huge network of voluntary societies,
often interdenominational and sometimes international in scope. Bible
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Societies (whose British parent body James Stephen described as ‘the
great Protestant propaganda ’) spread translations of the Scriptures
from Russia to the South Seas. Colporteurs of tract societies distributed
millions of pamphlets, which penetrated not only into cottages and
tenements, but into some polite drawing-rooms, closed to calf-bound
sermons, but receptive to genteel homilies like Hannah More’s Thoughts
on the Manners of the Great. In England, in a host of philanthropic
causes, from the City of London Truss Society for the Relief of the
Ruptured Poor to the campaign for the emancipation of the slaves.
Evangelicals lured many middle-class people and a sprinkling of peers
into the service of moral reform and ‘vital Christianity’. After the
foundation of the Baptist Missionary Society (1792) a cluster of societies
were formed in Europe and North America for the conversion of the
heathen. While they laid the foundation for a world-wide extension of
Protestantism in the nineteenth century, they were probably as yet
more successful in stirring up piety at home than in creating it overseas.
Missionary and philanthropic societies provided a romantic cause
which could enlist idealism and harness vague feelings of benevolence
to religious ends. They joined churches, locally and nationally, in
communal effort. Among the French Reformed Churches, for example,
the itinerant missionaries of the Continental Society spread the pietistic
doctrines of the Reveil, while agents of tract and Bible societies linked
together scattered congregations, coaxing them out of the ‘moral
Ghetto’ in which they had been enclosed by over a century of per-
secution. 1
It was in the English-speaking world that pietistic evangelicalism
probably shaped society most significantly. The English Nonconform-
ist denominations (particularly the Methodists) generally adapted them-
selves more easily to conditions in the new industrial cities than the
established Church, whose ancient parish system was often swamped by
great agglomerations of population. Anglicans encountered many
legal difficulties in building new churches in old parishes, but Dissenters
could quickly build little brick chapels in teeming streets, and penetrate,
through their cadres of lay helpers, into recesses unvisited by parson and
curate. Small craftsmen and artisans in the depersonalised industrial
towns, small farmers and farm labourers, fishermen and miners, those
on the fringes of organised culture, found in the fraternal life of the
chapel a sense of community ; in the emotional outpouring of revival and
prayer-meeting a release for fettered feeling and psychological stress.
Yet the drawing-power of Nonconformity on the industrial masses must
not be exaggerated. Well before 1830 the major denominations, including
the Wesleyans, were becoming manifestly more respectable and middle-
class. In many chapels, pew-rents segregated the more prosperous who
1 D. Robert, Les tglises Reformees en France, i8oo-i8$o (Paris, 1961), pp. 345-6.
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paid for their sittings from the poor who sat on their free seats in the
darker, less comfortable corners. The Religious Census of 1851 re-
vealed how little direct impact religion now made on the labouring
masses.
In the last years of the eighteenth century the revivalist tradition in
North America blazed up into another Great Awakening. Some of its
first major outbreaks took place in the colleges of the Eastern seaboard,
notably at Yale, whose president, Timothy Dwight, like his follower
Lyman Beecher, saw in revivalism a means to preserve the established
New England order from the inroads of Jeffersonian ‘Jacobinism’ and
the Unitarianism to which Harvard men seemed unfortunately prone.
The Eastern awakenings were decorous and controlled compared with
those which swept the West after 1800. As the thrust of population
beyond the Alleghanies became almost a stampede, the Eastern churches
grew deeply concerned with the problem of Christianising the unchurched
multitudes of the frontier and preserving the cultural unity of the
nation, threatened by the centrifugal force of westward migration. It
was not, however, the educated Presbyterian or Congregationalist
missionary from the East who followed the frontiersman’s trail most
successfully, but preachers from less sophisticated denominations:
Baptist farmer-preachers, who shared the primitive working life of their
flocks, or Methodist circuit-riders posting from one isolated settlement
to another, Bible and hymn-book in their saddle-bags. Wesley’s circuit
system with its itinerant preaching was superbly fitted for the frontier,
and by 1844 the Methodists had grown to become the largest Protestant
denomination in the United States. Environment inclined frontier
religion to be emotional, crude, democratic and unsacerdotal, and its
revivals were given to a good deal of hysteria, especially at the great
camp meetings, which drew settlers from wide areas and provided a
welcome solace from the tedium of cabin life. By 1830 something of the
Western fervour was relayed to the East in the magnetic person of
Charles G. Finney, the greatest revivalist (save perhaps Moody) of the
century. Finney’s methods showed how self-conscious and efficient
revivalism was becoming. A century earlier Jonathan Edwards had
seen revivals as a ‘surprising work of God’, to be prayed and preached
for, yet awaited as a mysterious shower of rain from heaven. Finney’s
celebrated Lectures on Revivals (1835) confidently set out the human
means by which revivals could be worked up. His new measures — such
as the ‘anxious seat’, in which the repentant, tended by ‘holy bands’,
were isolated from the congregation at a crucial moment — showed an
appreciation of the techniques of psychological manipulation, and
marked an important stage in the development of modern mass
evangelism.
But for many Christian intellectuals, dogmatic attachment to the
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Bible or to the letter of old confessions proved increasingly difficult.
Narrow conceptions of Biblical inspiration and infallibility were being
steadily undermined. Christian apologists had delighted to point out
the ethical value of the Bible : increasingly, this claim was countered by
bold spirits like Tom Paine, who drew attention to the cruelty and im-
morality of many Old Testament stories, or expressed moral revulsion at
some cardinal Christian doctrines, like that of a substitutionary atone-
ment. At the same time, as scientific knowledge advanced and the world
could be interpreted more and more from within in terms of its own
mechanistic laws, miraculous breaks in the natural order (like the
Biblical miracles) seemed less probable. It appeared decreasingly
necessary to postulate a God who intervened immediately in His
Creation through a special Providence. As geology progressed, a more
figurative interpretation of Genesis became obligatory for the self-
respecting scientist. The rocks suggested that the earth was not a mere
6000 years old, but of immense antiquity, and the Creation not
accomplished in six days but over a vast time-scale.
And like the rocks, so too the Bible had its different strata, whose
uncovering shook faith in the unerring historicity of Scripture. For
centuries the Bible had been generally regarded as the direct revelation
of the word of God. Be its inspiration literal or plenary, it was divinely
inspired and unerring, the repository of an organic body of dogma,
history and spiritual instruction, from which any text could be quoted
as authoritative. But as new methods of analysis — already applied to
other ancient literatures — were turned upon it, and its discrepancies
were probed into, attention began to focus also upon the human ele-
ments in its composition, on the complexities of its authorship, on its
components of legend, myth, sacred history and primitive poetry.
Following the footsteps of Semler, German ‘higher critics’ like Eich-
hom at Gottingen and De Wette at Halle uncovered some of the
separate strands of the Pentateuch, separating and dating them by
comparison of their style, vocabulary and content. Similar work was
begun on Isaiah, and on the ‘prophecy’ of Daniel. It was with greater
reluctance that critics approached the New Testament, though some
advance was made towards the unravelling of the Synoptic Problem,
the close similarities of the first three Gospels, which are in some ways
as puzzling as their discrepancies. Eichhom suggested that the three
Evangelists had used a common document, an Aramaic Urevangelium:
other critics, like Eckermann and Gieseler, put forward the claim that
the Gospels derived from oral traditions, written down at the end of the
first century. The riddle of the Fourth Gospel also drew fresh attention,
and Bretschneider’s Probabilia (1820) expressed current doubts about
its historicity and its Johannine authorship. Meanwhile, the search
continued for the historical Jesus who stood behind the Christ of
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theology. In the hands of rationalist scholars like Paulus, it was still
restricted largely to ingenious attempts to explain the miracles by natural
causes which the Evangelists had misunderstood.
Yet Protestant orthodoxy still often spoke as if the truth of Christian-
ity stood or fell by the literal veracity of the Bible. This was especially
the case in England, where the German higher criticism was regarded
with great distrust. In 1825 Connop Thirlwall remarked ‘it would
almost seem as if at Oxford the knowledge of German subjected a
divine to the same suspicion of heterodoxy which . . . was attached some
centuries back to the knowledge of Greek’. 1 Already, however, there
were some who tried to set their creed on bases less vulnerable than an
‘infallible’ Bible. The work of the higher critics had not been merely
destructive : from it emerged a vision of revelation not as a static body of
dogma, whose truths were timeless and complete, but as a slow and
evolutionary process accommodated to the successive stages of man’s
development. Revelation, said Lessing, was God’s progressive educa-
tion of the human race. The restrictive gloss on the terms ‘inspiration’
and ‘revelation’ was slowly broken down, as a distinction came to be
drawn between revelation and the documents that recorded it. The
biblical books, it was argued, were not in themselves the word of God,
though they contained that word. Objection to the letter of Scripture
did not destroy its validity, for its truth was inward and spiritual. A
conception of biblical truth as symbolic and moral, rather than literal
and historical, gained support from the German idealist philosophers
whose influence on speculative theology from Kant’s Critiques to the
death of Hegel in 1831 was varied and profound. In the successive
idealist systems, all avowedly religious, hopeful theologians saw
materials for a constructive theism which might set Christianity on
foundations beyond the reach of an encroaching materialism, and re-
solve the enmity between philosophy and religion. The progress of
science did not perturb Kant’s conception of true religion since it did
not affect the practical reason, or invalidate the inner moral con-
sciousness which he saw as the basis for faith as he conceived it. Hegel’s
grandiose system portrayed Christianity as the positive religion which
most clearly revealed the Absolute, unfolding itself in history and human
consciousness, and treated cardinal Christian doctrines — such as the
Incarnation and the Trinity — as symbolic representations of philoso-
phical truth.
It was in the theology of Schleiermacher (1768-1834), Hegel’s
colleague and rival at the University of Berlin, that Protestantism made
its most powerful effort to push through to fresh intellectual foundations.
His On Religion: Addresses to Cultured Despisers (1799), though very
1 C. Thirlwall, translation of F. D. Schleiermacher, Critical Essay On The Gospel of St
Luke (London, 1825), Introduction, p. ix.
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much the product of Romanticism, marked a new epoch in theology.
The development of his ideas into systematic form in his Christian
Faith (1821-2) showed him to be the greatest Protestant theologian
since the sixteenth century. He began by a simple but radical definition
of religion. It was not, he claimed, a set of dogmatic propositions or an
ethical code, but an inward experience, direct, intuitive, existing in its
own right as a central part of human fife, true to its own intrinsic
authority. His appeal was not to the old external evidences — Bible,
prophecies, miracles — but to the living religious consciousness. The
heart of religion, and its standard of interpretation, was the feeling of
utter dependence on a power beyond ourselves, ‘the immediate con-
sciousness of the universal existence of all finite things in and through
the Infinite.’ The religious consciousness found a multiplicity of
expressions, in art, science, in the great positive religions of the world,
but its highest and most comprehensive formulation lay in the Christian
religion, with its experience of redemption through the person of Christ.
The Christian doctrines, like the Christian Scriptures, were a crystallised
expression — though they could never be a complete expression — of the
corporate experience of the believing community. The experience, not
the dogma or the letter, was primary. If Schleiermacher’s redefinition
was accepted, many stumbling blocks between educated men and faith
were revealed as imaginary. ‘Miracles’, ‘revelation’, ‘inspiration’,
‘grace’, ‘prophecy’: these were all, in their way, formulations of a
fundamental, intuitive awareness of God, and of man’s need for Him.
By 1815 it was widely held in governmental circles that the forces of
religion should be used in the work of social restoration. Napoleon
himself had set a precedent: his Concordat had been an impressive
tribute to the need of secular government for the support of the Church,
and of monarchy for its sacramental blessing. On a diplomatic level the
Holy Alliance of Christian princes as projected by the Tsar remained an
eccentric gesture, but within individual states a holy alliance of throne
and altar was preached with enthusiasm. It was not necessary to read
Bonald or de Maistre to see a connection between the religious and
political innovation of the Revolution. By attacking Church and
monarchy simultaneously, the Jacobins had emphasised the solidarity
of those twin pillars of the old order. Even aristocratic sceptics now
saw the value of the Church as a bulwark against future revolutions,
while exile and tribulation brought to some a penitential reaction from
incredulity to belief. Before 1789, in the heyday of Voltairean sceptic-
ism, the devoutly religious man had not been a common phenomenon
in the forefront of politics. Things had changed: the Tsar of all the
Russias was for a time a convert to biblical mysticism; Charles X of
France a dedicated devot ; Frederick William III of Prussia the first of
his fine for a century to present an edifying picture of Christian family
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life. In France there was the powerful politico-religious secret society
of the Chevaliers de la Foi, borrowing its organisation in part from the
freemasons, but its ideals from the military and chivalric orders of
the Middle Ages. Pietism flourished among Prussian Junkers and
Wilberforce’s parliamentary ‘Saints’.
The needs of the Churches played a considerable part in the work of
political restoration after 1815. After clever lobbying by Consalvi at
the Congress of Vienna, the temporal power was restored to Pius VII
almost in its entirety, though the concern for ‘legitimacy’ did not extend
to the restoration of the German ecclesiastical principalities. States
recently aggrandised, or in which there had been secularisations, stood
in need of some form of diplomatic agreement with the Curia to restore
administrative order or draw up a new delimitation of dioceses. In
Germany the plight of the Roman Church was acute, for only six
bishops remained alive, of whom five were septuagenarians. In a
remarkable series of agreements, the Catholic Church was re-estab-
lished through much of Europe. Thus Concordats or bulls of cir-
cumscription were negotiated for Bavaria (1817), Naples (1818),
Russian Poland (1818), Prussia (1821), the United Netherlands (con-
cluded in 1827 but not executed), the Upper Rhenish Church Province
of Baden, Wiirttemberg, Nassau and the Hesses (1821 and 1827), and
Switzerland (1828). The bonds of Church and State, often loosened by
war and revolution, were drawn closer together again, as parochial and
diocesan life resumed its normal course. In the work of reconstruction
the Society of Jesus (restored by Pius VII in 1814) played an important
part.
In parts of Europe the confessional state re-appeared in much of its
old rigour. The Inquisition returned to Spain; Sardinia declared
fasting and Easter Communion compulsory once more; in the Papal
States the Jews were re-enclosed in the Ghetto, and vaccination and
street fighting swept away as dangerous relics of French innovation.
Yet outside the Italian and Iberian peninsulas the ecclesiastical restora-
tions, like many of the political, were characterised by some form of
compromise with liberalism. Even when restoring Catholicism as the
State religion, the Concordats usually reflected the advance of secularism
made since 1789. Napoleon’s Concordat had been once regarded by the
Curia as an exceptional concession to circumstance: by 1815 it had
become a much-imitated model, through which the domain of the
Catholic Church, once inextricably entwined in the fife of the State,
was confined and carefully delimited. The ancient exemptions of the
clergy from civil jurisdiction, their powers of censorship, of prosecuting
for heresy, their educational monopoly, had faded. 1 An eglise salariee
1 A. Latreille, L'£glise Catholique et la Revolution Frangaise (Paris, 1946-50), vol. n,
pp. 260 ff.
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lacked the protection from an encroaching Leviathan which the huge
endowments of the pre-revolutionary era had provided. The compara-
tive poverty of some churches after the secularisations helped to make
the Church less attractive to a worldly nobility, and to provide a
career open to talent, but it also curtailed their corporate independence.
Above all, Rome observed with dismay the spread of indifferentism and
tolerantism in States still predominantly Catholic. In 1824 Leo XII
protested at the way in which, in France ‘heterodox cults have been set
on the same level as the Catholic religion’, and similar protest was
levelled against the Fundamental Law governing Belgium and the
Bavarian Religious Edict of 1818, both of which granted equality of
civil rights to non-Catholics. If it was permissible to tolerate heretics,
Rome told the Belgian bishops in 1816, it was never permissible to take
an engagement to protect heretical sects or their errors.
Rome continued to put her trust in princes. Under Consalvi’s
influence Pius VII wisely refused, when pressed, to join the Congress
System. Having escaped from Napleon’s confederation, he did not want
to enter Metternich’s. But the cause of ‘legitimacy’ found energetic
support at Rome. The sympathies of the papal monarchy were firmly
with the ‘family of sovereigns’ and her influence pitted against the rising
tide of constitutionalism and democracy. Democracy had meant in-
vasion and pillage by the armies of the Directory, and now meant the
cabalistic plottings of the Carbonari and the secret societies, who kept the
Legations in a state of simmering rebelliousness. And how could the
doctrine of popular sovereignty, or even the practice of parliamentarism,
be conceded within the Papal States? Was not the absolute sovereignty
claimed by the Pope in spiritualibus incompatible with his temporal
subjection to a lay, elective Italian assembly? The universal, spiritual
aspect of the temporal power, which forced Pius VII to resist Napoleon,
helped inspire his successors to resist the strongest political currents of
their time, and to tie them to the chariot wheels of reaction. After the
death of Pius VII in 1823 and the subsequent fall of Consalvi, the
influence of the zelanti was uppermost. Leo XII issued the first of the
series of doctrinal condemnations of political liberalism, soon strength-
ened by Gregory XVI’s Mirari Vos (1832), which denounced the ideal of
liberty of conscience as ‘absurd’, freedom of the press as ‘execrable’,
and likened those who encouraged subjects to rebel against their rulers
to ‘sons of Belial’. Yet, beyond Rome, Catholics lay and even clerical
were often driven into attitudes which conflicted with those of the
Papacy; into mass political action, outright support of liberalism, or
even rebellion.
In South America at least, the revolutions against the Spanish
government had seldom taken an anti-Catholic or even a properly anti-
clerical form. The Spanish-born bishops were mostly strong royalists,
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but many of the American-born lower clergy had supported the
revolutions. In Mexico, the Viceroy Venegas invoked the Virgen de los
Remedios as generala of the royalist troops, but the rebel priest Hidalgo
proclaimed the Virgin of Guadalupe as patroness of the revolt. The
revolutionary leaders professed themselves good Catholics, and the
constitutions of the new republics, like that of monarchist Brazil, still
preserved Catholicism as the exclusive state religion, and denied the
right of public worship to other confessions. But the Latin American
revolutions presented the Curia with a delicate problem. The flight or
death of many bishops (by 1829 there was not a single bishop in Mexico)
led rebel governments to press urgently for recognition by Rome and to
claim the patronage rights exercised by the Spanish crown. Yet for
Rome to institute bishops for rebel South America was an affront
to the prerogatives of the Most Catholic King of Spain, and to the
principle of legitimacy. But to refuse institution might lead to schism,
and, in Consalvi’s opinion, open the way to proselytising ‘Methodists,
Presbyterians and even sun worshippers’. Rome hesitated long. In
1816 and 1824 encyclicals urged the clergy of the rebellious colonies to
support their lawful monarch in Madrid. But by 1827 Leo XII had
taken the important step of preconising proprietary bishops for some
South American sees, a policy extended by Gregory XVI.
In Europe too, a number of Catholic leaders were forced to question
the principle of throne and altar. It seemed hazardous in an age of
revolutions to bind the Church to particular dynasties. Did this not
drive the enemies of political reaction into enmity to the Church?
The fall of an unpopular regime, like that of Ferdinand of Spain in
1820, or Charles X of France in 1830, discredited the clergy who had
helped to prop it up. If the close association of Church and State had
been accepted tacitly and naturally before 1789, the continuum had
been broken by the Revolution, and its restoration in 1815, after
decades of spreading secularism, appeared as a self-conscious and
deliberate tactic of political reaction. Moreover, the price exacted by
legitimist rulers for the protection of the Church often seemed exor-
bitant. What Josephist, Gallican or heretic princes construed as
legitimate State protection of the Church could be regarded by Catholics
as interference with her inner spiritual life. Unattractive clauses of the
Concordats had a habit of being evaded by the State: promised
endowments were not always forthcoming, and the liberties of the
Church could be curtailed by police regulations modelled on the
Organic Articles. In dealing with such problems, Rome preferred top-
level negotiation between Curia and Chancellery, and her traditional
methods of subtle and resourceful diplomacy. She remained in general
distrustful of direct political action by Catholics, particularly priests, for
religious purposes. Yet the advent of forms of constitutional govem-
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ment allowed Catholics to mobilise themselves within a parliamentary
framework. If anti-clericals were politically organised, why not
Catholics? Before 1830, when Lamennais’ newspaper U Avenir broad-
cast the ideas of liberal Catholicism, there had already been several
successful attempts at Catholic political action led by men who accepted,
whether for tactical reasons or with ideological conviction, the pre-
suppositions of political liberalism : freedom of the press, of debate, of
worship, even the separation of Church and State. These, it was argued,
could be used for Catholic ends. Under present conditions the Church
had often more to gain from a liberal regime of freedom than from the
trammels of princely despotism.
The movement away from the politics of throne and altar was notice-
able where the altars were Catholic but the thrones were occupied by
princes who were not only heretics but aliens: Ireland, Belgium, the
Prussian Rhineland, Russian Poland. Here a struggle for national
independence or local autonomy could also become a struggle for con-
fessional liberty or parity. The Irish campaign for Catholic Emancipa-
tion provided an early example. O’Connell’s movement to relieve
Catholics from their civil disabilities was also a demonstration of
nationalism against English rule. His Catholic Association, founded
in 1823, was in some ways a portent of future Catholic political action
in Europe, by its use of mass meetings, petitions, press and pulpit, and its
appeal to liberal principles of civil and religious freedom. Years before
Lamennais, O’Connell showed himself both a Catholic and a liberal,
whose liberalism rested on conviction. In 1811 he declared ‘the
principle on which I have been . . . the advocate of Catholic emancipa-
tion is not confined to Ireland. ... It embraces the causes of Dis-
senters in England, and of the Protestants in the Spanish and Portuguese
territories. ... I hate the Inquisition as much as I do the Orange
and Purple system’. 1
Catholic leaders in Belgium, however, were driven — reluctantly —
towards political liberalism for reasons that were opportunist and not
ideological. The fusion in 1815 of Catholic Belgium with Protestant
Holland under the Calvinist King William had aroused religious as
well as political tensions (Chapter XVII (a)). Led by the choleric
Bishop of Ghent, the Belgian hierarchy had bitterly attacked the
obnoxious liberalism of the Fundamental Law of 1815, because it
guaranteed religious equality to all religions, and thus put error on
the same legal level as Catholic truth. Yet by 1828 Catholic political
leaders had made a remarkable about-turn. Disgusted by William’s
Josephist treatment of the Church — particularly his extension of State
control over Catholic schools and seminaries — they decided to join
1 The Life and Speeches of Daniel O'Connell, M.P., ed. J. O’Connell (Dublin, 1846),
vol. 1, p. 109.
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forces with their anti-clerical liberal opponents, and to demand from
the government a properly parliamentary regime, with freedom for the
press and for education. Despotism was a graver threat than liberalism.
Hesitantly, each party swallowed its suspicion of the other’s good in-
tentions and agreed to continue their struggle within the framework of
a liberal constitution, not by the old methods of coercion, but by an
appeal to the force of argument and to public opinion. The Belgian
Catholics joined the huge petitioning campaign against the government:
the lower clergy (though not their bishops) brought mass support for
the Revolution in 1830. The lasting fruit of the Union was the Belgian
Constitution of 1831, by which the Churches enjoyed a freedom much
envied throughout Europe. Church and State were not separated
entirely, since the State paid the clergy of the three main Churches.
But Catholics at last had freedom to run their own schools, form
religious orders, nominate to bishoprics, and communicate undisturbed
with the Holy See. Yet the whole sequence of events had been observed
with dismay at Rome. Cardinal Albani described the Union as
‘monstrous’, and the nuncio at Paris, the future Cardinal Lambruschini,
growled at the irresponsibility of priests who helped to dethrone a law-
ful monarch and prepare the way for an ‘atheist’ constitution.
The problem facing Frederick William III in the Rhineland re-
sembled in some ways that which the Dutch king encountered in
Belgium: how to assimilate to a mainly Protestant State a Catholic
population with strong local traditions. The tension between the new
western provinces of Prussia, largely Catholic, with growing industries
and a long contact with French liberalism, and the older provinces of the
east, mainly Protestant, agrarian and conservative, did not lead to
revolution. The Rhineland did not become the ‘Prussian Ireland’.
But by the 1840’s the rumbles of approaching Kulturkampf were
clearly audible. Prussian officials in the Rhineland were apt to be
authoritarian and heavy-handed (one censored the advertisement for a
translation of Dante’s Divina Commedia on the grounds that divine
things could not be comic), and the attempts made from Berlin to
integrate Catholicism into the Prussian state system helped to fuse the
cause of Rhenish particularism with that of Rhenish Catholicism, in a
common defensive front. Though 80 per cent of the Rhineland was
Catholic, the principle of confessional parity was violated by the pre-
ference given to Protestants in civil and military posts. In many
parishes the Burgermeister was the only Protestant. Berlin was appre-
hensive at the control of Prussian consciences by Rome, and tried to
support Catholic opponents of Ultramontanism. Thus the sees of
Cologne and Trier were filled by the two ‘Febronian’ prelates Spiegel
and Hommer, and the rationalistic Professor Hermes was set over the
Catholic theological faculty at Bonn. But it was marriage legislation
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that was to prove most provocative. From 1 803 Prussian children of
mixed marriages had to be educated in their father’s religion. This
ruling, extended in 1825 to the Rhineland, not only contradicted
Catholic practice but seemed an attempt at proselytism, for many such
marriages were between Protestant officials and daughters of the local
bourgeoisie. In 1837 these grievances exploded in the celebrated
‘Cologne affair’, a head-on collision between the government and the
new, uncompromising Archbishop of Cologne, Droste-Vischering,
who refused to yield over mixed marriages and put the ‘Hermesians’
under a ban, so successfully that they soon lectured to empty benches.
Droste-Vischering’s imprisonment led to huge and noisy demonstra-
tions of Catholic solidarity, to riots, cavalry charges, and a pamphlet
war which marked the prelude to the growth of German political
Catholicism.
Nowhere, perhaps, were the politics of throne and altar more
provocatively proclaimed than in France, where legitimism and
Catholicism seemed inextricably bound up. ‘I see,’ a sceptic remarked,
‘that God died on a gibbet eighteen hundred years ago on behalf of the
Bourbon family.’ The Church gained many favours from the Ultras
(Chapter VII). Yet the ecclesiastical restoration remained an obvious
compromise between the norms of the old order and the achievements of
the Revolution. The attitude of the Most Christian King towards the
Church was ambivalent: his Constitution proclaimed Catholicism the
religion of the State — yet guaranteed religious liberty. Protestant
churches remained subsidised by the budget des cultes. Efforts to undo
the work of the Revolution came to little. The attempt to replace
Napoleon’s Concordat, with its unhappy associations for many
emigre clergy, failed. Another Napoleonic masterpiece, the Universite,
symbolic of the secular control of secondary education brought about
by the Revolution, continued to exist, though put under a clerical grand
master. The ferocious sacrilege law remained a dead-letter. Little was
done to restore freedom to the religious orders. Furthermore, the
attitude of Restoration governments remained firmly Gallican, and the
Organic Articles not only remained on the statute book but were
applied. In disgust, Lamennais and his Ultramontane followers declared
that successive royalist governments had so compromised with the
satanic Revolution that France was no longer a Catholic, but a secular,
indifferentist, ‘atheist’ state. Disillusioned with the so-called Union of
Throne and Altar, Lamennais began to move towards the Liberal
Catholicism of which he was to be the greatest publicist. His Des
Progres de la Revolution (1829) called on the Church to cut loose from
political entanglements, and to ‘isolate herself completely from a
politically atheist society’. She must close her ranks, and draw tighter
the links which bound her to the centre of all her spiritual authority,
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the Holy See. Now that political and religious society were no longer
organically bound together, the old theocratic order was no longer
possible. The Church must accept her position in the indifferentist
State, and use boldly for her own advantage the liberal freedoms which
the Constitution professed to guarantee (Vol. X, p. 77).
In States predominantly Protestant, one could see most of the main
varieties of Church-State relations. At one extreme Sweden, Denmark
and Norway, overwhelmingly Lutheran, remained confessional States
in which separation from the national Church was illegal. At the other
extreme stood the United States where, under the system of Separation,
the divisions of religious life were not those of Church and sect, as often
in Europe, but those between a multiplicity of denominations, free and
equal in the eyes of the federal government. Nothing, however, pre-
vented individual States from regulating their internal affairs on very
different principles. Religious tests for office survived in some States
(particularly in the South) long into the nineteenth century. And though
Separation was widely accepted at State level by 1800, forms of State
establishment remained in Connecticut till 1818, and in Massachusetts
till 1833. But many opponents of Separation came to agree, like
Lyman Beecher, that its results stirred the disestablished clergy into
new activity: ‘by voluntary efforts, societies, missions, and revivals, they
exert a deeper influence than ever they could by queues, and shoe-
buckles, and cocked hats and gold-headed canes.’ 1 To many Europeans,
dissenters warring against an arrogant establishment, or members of a
State Church fretting at Erastianism, the American system seemed to
provide a working model of religious freedom. It was a paradox, much
pondered by travellers like Tocqueville or Harriet Martineau, that
religion appeared to flourish more under voluntarism in North America
than it did in Europe, where it was protected and established; that
Christianity and democracy, often dangerously opposed in the Old
World, were strangely conjoined in the New.
By contrast, Erastianism still flourished in Germany. In Prussia, the
direction of both Protestant Churches was brought increasingly under
unified control by the government. To administrative centralisation was
added an attempt at ecclesiastical fusion. In 1817, tercentenary of the
Reformation, Frederick William III called for a voluntary union of
Lutheran and Reformed into one united Evangelical Christian Church.
In many ways the time seemed ripe for union. The old doctrinal barriers
(if sometimes reinforced by the neo-confessional revival) had been largely
submerged by the torrent of eighteenth-century rationalism, and did not
weigh heavily on many pietists, or on clergy influenced by Schleiermacher
or the idealist philosophers. But what form should union take? A
1 L. Beecher, Autobiography, Correspondence Etc., ed. C. Beecher (London, 1864-5),
vol. 1, p. 344.
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doctrinal ‘consensus-union’, based on the residuum of beliefs held in
common? Or an external union in worship and organisation? And
how should it be achieved ? By the initiative of the Churches themselves,
freed at last from the grip of bureaucracy; or by royal prerogative and
cabinet order? Controversy broke out when the king applied his
ecclesiological zeal to produce a new liturgy or Agenda, to be used by
both Churches. Though it met with considerable opposition — par-
ticularly because of its similarities to the mass and its relegation of
hymns and sermon to the background of worship — in modified form it
was gradually extended through Prussia, though often only by crude
administrative pressure. As Schleiermacher jested bitterly, honours
like the Order of the Red Eagle were handed out to unworthy recipients
non propter acta sed propter Agenda. Opposition in the Rhineland and
Westphalia was largely overcome by 1835, but the obstinacy of con-
servative Silesian Lutherans was met by force, and led to tragic schism
and mass emigrations to the United States. The union, copied else-
where in Germany, sometimes more happily, remained in Prussia a
confederation between the confessions, which preserved their doctrinal
identity, though bound in worship and government.
By 1830 the dominant position of the Church of England had been
much eroded. During and after the Napoleonic wars, our ‘happy
constitution in Church and State’ was widely regarded as the Ark in
which we had ridden out the deluge which had engulfed less fortunate
lands. To the utilitarian arguments for the alliance of Church and
State, put forward by Warburton and Paley, had been added Burke’s
eloquent though old-fashioned claim that this was still a Christian
Commonwealth in which Church and State were ‘one and the same
thing, being different integral parts of the same whole’. Politicians,
Whig and Tory, agreed with Croker’s view of Westminster Abbey as
‘part of the British Constitution’. In a time of political disorder, the
prudential argument for a national religious establishment seemed
stronger than ever, and in 1818 Parliament granted a million pounds,
and in 1824 half a million, to build new churches in populous areas.
But the anomalies of the Anglican claim to be the Church of the Nation
— plain since 1689 — became increasingly blatant. For in Britain, as
elsewhere, mere toleration was no longer enough, and the demand for
religious equality became harder to withstand. Catholic Emancipation
in 1829 struck a blow at the notion of the ‘Protestant Constitution’ of
Britain. Meanwhile, as Protestant Dissenters became more numerous,
they became more vociferous about the grievances of their second-class
citizenship. They were strong enough in 1811, by formidable lobbying,
to scotch Sidmouth’s attempt to curb the freedom of their itinerant
preachers, the ‘tailors, pig-drovers, chimney-sweeps etc.’ whose rude
homilies disturbed the slumber of Anglican parishes. In 1828 Non-
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conformists gained the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, but
their campaign for parity did not stop while they were still virtually
excluded from Oxford and Cambridge, buried and married by the par-
son, and forced to pay church rates. Increasingly, education became
the battlefield between Churchman and Dissenter. Anglicans held that
the Church of the Nation must be the educator of the nation. But the
parish schools supported by the Anglicans’ National Society were
challenged by those of the British and Foreign Society, heavily supported
by Nonconformists, which taught a carefully generalised version of
Christianity on an undenominational basis. The Anglican monopoly of
English university education sprang a small but significant leak when the
secular London University was opened in 1828, with support from
Dissenters and agnostics. The mounting attack on the establishment
seemed to have reached a climax in 1831, when the Bishop of Bristol’s
palace was burned in the Reform Bill riots. Ironically, though pastoral
standards had risen sharply — ‘whenever you meet a clergyman my
age’, said the elderly Sydney Smith to young Gladstone in about 1835,
‘you may be quite sure he is a bad clergyman’ — the clergy were less
popular now than in the slumberous days of the eighteenth century. In
the ’thirties a formidable, if heterogeneous, army stood ranged against
the establishment: disgruntled Dissenters; Chartists calling for ‘more
pigs and fewer parsons’; Irish Catholics unwilling to pay tithes to an
alien Church; Utilitarians inveighing against the misuse of Church
property which, said J. S. Mill, was originally intended for ‘the cultiva-
tion of learning, the diffusion of religious instruction, and the education
of youth’. In a famous aphorism Thomas Arnold cried ‘the Church
as it now stands no human power can save’. In a sense he was right.
But the administrative overhaul begun by Peel and Blomfield, the
spiritual revival of the Oxford Movement, and Arnold’s own type of
Liberal Anglicanism, which adjusted churchmen to some of the
shocks of German scholarship, were soon to provide the Church of
England with fresh resilience.
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P ub li copinion first became a major force in Europe in the period
of the French Revolution and of the Restoration. First of all the
revolutionaries carried their gospel all over Europe. Later the
opponents of French hegemony carried on the war against Napoleon
through the press as well as on the battlefield. When peace returned
again to Europe in 1814-15 the traditional rulers found that the
tempest could not be stilled. Through the press and through the societies
open and secret the struggle between the old and the new worlds went on.
The old world was powerful and resourceful, but it could never strangle
the demon of change. The ferment was European. Philhellenism, which
appealed to the classical background of educated Europeans, aimed at
aiding the Greek patriots; it also aroused the question why the fight
against the oppressor should be limited to the shores of the Aegean.
Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic Association won the vote for Catholic
Ireland from Protestant England; it was admired and copied by
Catholic Belgium for use against Protestant Holland. The press
became more and more the vehicle of political and of economic change,
and the chief means of expression of a middle class avid for political
and for economic power.
As opinion in all European countries grew more confident and more
vocal, so did the activity of government in controlling it increase.
Napoleon saw the importance of this; so did Metternich. Even in
liberal countries like England and Restoration France governments
showed great activity. For if this was the period of revolution and of the
clamant popular will, it was also the period of growing state power.
What the Enlightenment had promoted, the Revolution established.
Unified state power was the chief beneficiary from revolution and
change. If governments took care to control the way in which opinion
was expressed, they took even greater care to control the way in which
it was formed. Education, which in its origins had been the concern
of the Church, was becoming more and more the concern of the State.
This process had gone a long way already before 1789. Under the
Napoleonic and Restoration regimes it was to gain steady momentum.
The State’s interest in education was primarily directed to training its
own future servants and to creating an ethos favourable to the con-
tinuation of its own power. It might construe these duties liberally, as
on the whole it did in the German States where state advantage in-
cluded a broad view of national culture. It might construe them
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narrowly as in France when Napoleon formed his educational in-
stitutions on a more definitely utilitarian basis. In either case the under-
lying reality was the same, and every government saw its educational
system as one of the main bulwarks of its own power.
‘Educational system’ in that context means the universities and the
grammar schools where a learned education was given and the lawyers,
the clerics, the bureaucrats of the future were trained. There was still
the great problem of the education of the people. In England the state
as yet took no official part. In France the revolutionaries had been
generous in words but nothing was really done until after the Bourbon
Restoration. It was only in the German countries that real strides had
been made during this period, to a great extent under the influence of the
Swiss theorist Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. Even here danger threatened.
On religious, on humanitarian, on practical grounds it was desirable that
the poor should be educated. What if they used their knowledge to
claim a higher place for themselves than the divine order had decreed ?
The dilemma extended a good deal beyond popular education. All
educational institutions in the countries of the European continent
were falling more under state control and aiming at fulfilling ends
selected for them by the State. Yet the human mind refuses to heed the
bounds set for it by its well-intentioned shepherds and friends. The
knowledge which may make a man a good minor bureaucrat or a
competent non-commissioned officer also enables him to read criticisms
in the newspapers, whether printed legally or not. So if state power
was advancing, the power of public opinion was advancing too. A
clash between them could not be avoided. It became even more serious
when complicated by national or religious rivalries, as in Belgium,
in Italy, in the lands of the Austrian Empire or in Poland. The story of
such clashes is told under the history of some of the countries concerned
but they left their mark also on educational systems, and on the social
organisation of opinion.
In this period the press became the most important expression of the
public opinion which was everywhere growing up. It had reached its
most advanced stage in England, though even there newspapers were
still comparatively small and poor and venal, and were becoming only
towards the end of the period the great organs of the public mind which
they were to be in the middle of the nineteenth century. Although in the
eighteenth century the press had been freer in England than in other
countries, it was still very much at the mercy of the government. Fox’s
Libel Act of 1792 protected newspapers by enabling the jury to decide
on the criminality of the alleged libel as well as on the fact of publica-
tion, but its passage coincided with the beginning of the struggle with
revolutionary France, and of a period when government took an active
part in suppressing newspapers. Eldon boasted in 1795 that ‘there
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had been more prosecutions for libel within the last two years than there
had been for twenty years before’. 1 These facts show not only that
government was very active but that newspapers were becoming in-
creasingly important as mouthpieces of public opinion. Acts of 1798
and 1799, to prevent the printing and dissemination of seditious litera-
ture, required that the names and addresses of the printer and publisher
of all sorts of newspapers, books and papers should be registered.
A more insidious but equally effective method of control was found by
increasing the duties on newspapers and advertisements. In 1789 the
newspaper stamp-duty was raised to 2 d\ in 1815 it had reached 4 d.
In 18 1 1 duty was paid on 24,422,000 newspapers, but this number
had altered very little by 1821. The number was high but was not
substantially rising. In 1821 The Times was paying slightly less in
stamp-duty than its chief rivals, the Morning Chronicle and the Courier
combined. As a result of the trial of Queen Caroline (1820) its sale
went up from 7000 to more than 15,000. The duties made it difficult
for the circulation of newspapers to grow or for advertising revenue to
provide a really stable basis for their finances. But despite all these
measures and despite the extensive powers of the Attorney-General
under the libel laws, there was no censorship during the war years.
At the beginning of the period the true censorship lay in the fact that
the newspapers had not yet reached financial independence. The tradi-
tion was that newspapers depended on the administration or on the
parties. The Treasury found money to start new journals. Journalists
asked for fees to suppress gossip paragraphs or to contradict them if
they had been published. In the early years of the French Revolution
the government was spending nearly £5000 a year on the press; The
Times, for instance, had a subsidy of £300 a year from 1789 to 1799.
The paper most closely connected with the Tory governments of
1807-30 was the Courier. Canning said that one of its proprietors,
T. G. Street, was paid £2000 to support the Perceval Ministry. In the
1820’s Government tended to confine its advertisements to friendly
newspapers, to purchase large numbers of copies of papers to give them
away, and to circulate its own pamphlets.
Slowly a new tradition of press independence was growing. Here a
newspaper of consequence was the Morning Chronicle, bought by
James Perry in 1789, which became the leading political journal for a
long time, really until the end of the war. The Times, founded in 1785,
was not of great consequence until the second John Walter took charge
of it in 1803. The paper had been connected with the Addingtons but
after 1806 Walter maintained its independence from political groups. He
strengthened its economic position and adopted in 1814 the Koenig
1 H. R. Fox Bourne, English newspapers: Chapters in the History of Journalism (London,
1887), vol. 1, p. 244.
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steam press. He employed a more scrupulous type of journalist. He
secured a better and quicker news service by attacking the Post Office
monopoly of the foreign mails maintained in the private interest of the
Post Office clerks. The higher standards of independent criticism which
were being followed in The Times were represented in periodical litera-
ture by John and Leigh Hunt’s Examiner (1808) and by the two
great quarterlies, the Whig Edinburgh (1802) and the Tory Quarterly
(1809).
With the new century the tradition of radical criticism which had
been suppressed in the early years of the war began to revive again. In
1802 the greatest of Radical journalists, William Cobbett, founded the
Weekly Political Register and used it to criticise government measures.
In 1809 he was sent to prison for two years for criticising the flogging
of some militiamen. The Hunts, too, had made reform and liberal
measures an important part of their programme. They were several
times in danger and finally in February 1813 were each fined £500 and
each sent to prison for two years for an attack on the prince regent. In
1816 Cobbett issued a cheap edition of his Register for id; he fled to
the United States the following year when Habeas Corpus was sus-
pended. In the harsh years of reaction after the war the government took
severe measures against Radical journalists and pamphleteers; for
instance the Publications Act of 1819 made cheap weeklies newspapers
within the terms of the Newspaper Act of 1798 and of the Stamp-Duty
Acts and required publishers and printers of periodicals to enter into
recognisances. Both government and private societies prosecuted
Radicals like the parodist William Hone and particularly the deist and
republican Richard Carlile, a fanatic for press freedom in the cause of
which he suffered a long imprisonment. The brunt of the struggle for
free expression was borne by the pamphleteers rather than by the
newspapers which were more prosperous and had more to lose. Carlile
was finally released in 1825 and Peel, who had gone to the Home Office
in 1822, saw that no good was done by prosecutions; from 1822 to
1829 there were hardly any for libel.
Carlile and Hone were radical extremists; the emergence of a serious
reforming political journalism was particularly connected with the
growth of The Times and the work of its first great editor Thomas
Barnes who succeeded to the chair in 1817. Under him the paper sought
to identify itself with the substantial middle classes. It became cele-
brated for the excellence of its home intelligence and the accuracy
with which it reflected public opinion. As Denis Ie Marchant, secretary
to Lord Brougham, 1830-4, wrote later of Barnes: ‘he had correspon-
dents in all the populous parts of England from whom he endeavoured to
learn the state of public opinion and whether he guided or followed it
was much the same to him so that his paper enjoyed the credit which he
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always claimed of being the guardian of it.’ 1 The Times attacked
Peterloo and opposed the Six Acts. It supported the queen and
canalised the great movement of public opinion which her trial produced.
It supported Catholic Emancipation in 1829. It criticised King George
IV after his death. In the movement for parliamentary and administra-
tive reform the press took a very important part, through the work of
journalists like James Black of the Morning Chronicle and Albany
Fonblanque of the Examiner. The provincial press, which had earlier
been politically insignificant, had prominent advocates of reform in the
Leeds Mercury and the Manchester Guardian (founded in 1821).
Benthamite opinions were expressed in the Westminster Review (1823)
and R. S. Rintoul’s Spectator (1828). The collapse of Toryism during
the i 820 ’s is shown by the poor quality of the Tory journalism of the
time. The ultra Tory Morning Journal (1828) was prosecuted by
Wellington’s government in 1829 for its attacks on him. ‘The whole
press have united on this occasion,’ Greville wrote, ‘and in some very
powerful articles have spread to every comer of the country the strongest
condemnation of the whole proceeding.’ 2 J. W. Croker thought at about
the same time that the control of the press should be in the hands of a
cabinet minister, for the days had gone by when ‘statesmen might safely
despise the journals, or only treat them as inferior engines’. 3 All
governments felt that it was vital to control the press yet impossible to
do so. The press had certainly made great strides in England since
1789. When Fonblanque wrote in the Examiner that Wellington’s fall
in 1830 was ‘a warning to statesmen of the controlling genius of the age
and the power of opinion’, 4 the press could claim most of the credit for
the change.
In France the power of the press had been one of the new forces un-
leashed by the revolutionary impulse of 1789, and, once its potentialities
had become apparent, it had played a great part in the hands of journa-
lists like Desmoulins, Marat and Hebert in precipitating the fall of the
monarchy. The freedom of the press had been one of the common
demands of the cahiers des doleances; it was mentioned in the Declara-
tion of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen; it was guaranteed by the
Constitutions of 1791 and of 1793. However the press fell into the hands
of the Revolutionary Tribunal like all other organs of opinion, and
later under the gradually strengthened control of the Directory.
Bonaparte maintained the same tradition with greater force and
efficiency. He was highly conscious of the power of the press and
1 The History of The Times: ‘ The Thunderer' in the Making, 1785-1841 (London, 1935),
pp. 458-9-
8 C. Greville, A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, ed. H.
Reeve, 4th edn. (London, 1875), vol. 1, p. 259.
8 A. Aspinall, Politics and the Press, c. 1780-1850 (London, 1949), p. 233.
4 H. R. Fox Bourne, op. cit., vol. n, pp. 32-3.
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appreciated the great strides which it had made as the mouthpiece of
public opinion since 1789; ‘four hostile newspapers’, he remarked, ‘did
more harm than 100,000 men in the open field.’ He was anxious to
prevent the dissemination of news hostile to the regime and to ensure
that he had at his command newspapers which would promulgate the
official version of events and pour ridicule on everything else. He
followed, in fact, both a negative and a positive press policy. During
the campaign of 1796 he kept in close touch with journalists in Paris
and made use of press propaganda to establish his position both in
France and in Italy. In 1800 the official press made him out as the hero
of Marengo, a victory for which he could in fact claim little credit.
On many later occasions the true purpose of French policy or the correct
movements of French armies were concealed behind a smokescreen of
inaccurate and misleading information put out by the official press
deriving originally from the Moniteur officiel. Immediately after the
coup d'etat of Brumaire 1799 severe measures were taken. A decree of
January 1800 suppressed all political papers in the department of the
Seine except thirteen, and these were subjected to a harsh censorship.
The permitted papers were very closely watched by a press bureau
established in the Ministry of Police, and the police kept a careful eye
on printers and booksellers.
By this time, moreover, French ideas and the French appeal to
the opinion and will of the peoples had spread over much of Europe.
The old governments had done their best to prevent the extension of the
new spirit. In so far as they recognised the role of the press at all, they
interpreted that role as being merely to report facts without any com-
ment on them. Both in Austria and in Prussia government tightened up
their regulations under the French threat. It was sometimes suggested
that the governments should themselves make use of the press as the
French were doing, but they had at first no positive policy and the press
seemed a dangerous weapon. Nor did newspapers seem in Germany a
real necessity of civilised living. When in 1798 Cotta established the
Allgemeine Zeitung, the first great German political daily, he was
warned by a correspondent that, whereas daily papers were an advant-
age in London or Paris where thousands of men wanted to read them,
they would seem a superfluity in Germany where the post went only
twice a week. Nevertheless at the end of the century the importance of
the press was growing in Germany and the demand for freedom of
opinion which had originally been personal and individual was becom-
ing identified more completely with the demand for a free press.
In many countries which the French overran their armies seemed to
bring with them a new dawn of freedom. But, so far as the open
expression of opinion was concerned, the dawn was false. Both in
Switzerland and in Italy the coming of the French invaders brought the
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breaking of old bonds, a new interest in the press by the people, and an
onrush of journalistic activity. In Switzerland the constitution of the
new Helvetic Republic guaranteed the freedom of the press, and there
was great activity among both supporters and opponents of the regime.
However the dawn of freedom was transitory and under the Napoleonic
regime strict control returned. Si mila rly the Italian campaign of 1796
brought with it active French press propaganda, and papers with
revolutionary sympathies appeared in towns like Venice and Genoa
as they were occupied. New activity and wider freedom of speech was
evident and the newspaper-reading habit spread, though again the
Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy had a strict press law and the bonds of
State control were drawn tightly again as they had been before 1796.
In France itself a press regime which had been illiberal from the time
of Brumaire grew steadily more severe. The Constitution of the Year
VIII did not affirm the liberty of the press and, although a commission
on the freedom of the press existed under the Empire, it provided a
quite illusory guarantee. The most important of the French papers was
the Journal des Debats of the brothers Bertin which had existed since
1789. It had ten to twelve thousand subscribers. Government control
over it was gradually tightened. In 1805 a special censor was appointed
for it and it was renamed Journal de VEmpire. The emperor himself
appointed an editor and took over part of the profits for pensions to
men of letters, until in 1811 the whole property of the paper was con-
fiscated by the state. Napoleon both kept a rigid control over any hostile
comment and himself sought to provide news and opinions favourable
to his own cause ; in 18 10 he wrote to Fouche instructing him to warn the
editor of the Publiciste against an article which seemed to favour the
Spanish monks and asked him to commission articles pointing out their
positive stupidity and ignorance. The provincial press was ordered in
1807 to take its political news exclusively from the official Moniteur.
In 1809 only one political paper was allowed to survive per department,
a rule which was extended throughout the French Empire, and in 1811
the Paris papers were limited to four, the Moniteur, Journal de VEmpire,
Gazette de France, Journal de Paris. In 1810 the number of printers was
limited by law and a general book-censorship was organised; the attitude
of the government to the expression of critical opinion in books was
shown by the ban on the printing of Madame de Stael’s De VAllemagne
and the order that she should leave France. As the situation got worse,
Napoleon’s press policy became even stricter.
Of all the vassals of Napoleonic France the yoke probably lay heaviest
on Germany. In the areas annexed by France on the left bank of the
Rhine French control was strict despite the expectations of freedom
which the Revolution had aroused, and in the days of the Empire the
same regime was maintained in the states of the Confederation of the
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Rhine. Cotta’s Allgemeine Zeitung moved into Bavaria, first to Ulm
(1803) and then to Augsburg (1810). It came under French control
after 1805 and repeated the French directives as they were issued; for
instance the troop preparations of 18 11 for the Russian campaign were
described as designed to protect the German coasts against an English
attack. Similarly in Saxony the Leipziger Zeitung was instructed by the
Saxon government to avoid anything which might be offensive to the
French imperial court, or the publication of any news harmful or un-
pleasant to the French unless it had already been reported in the
Moniteur. In 1811 the German newspapers were allowed to publish
political news only from the Moniteur.
In the surviving states like Austria and Prussia the Napoleonic domi-
nation plunged governments into a very difficult dilemma. Their whole
tradition was to avoid any kind of open press discussion of controversial
issues; on the other hand the example of the Napoleonic propaganda
suggested to them that they too needed a positive press policy. The
two points of view were hard to reconcile. In Prussia an edict of King
Frederick William III (1798) ordered newspapers to avoid anything
which might give offence to foreign courts or states or which might
promote revolutionary ideas and sympathies. In 1809 the publicist
Adam Miiller produced a plan for an official newspaper to lead and
direct public opinion, but nothing came of the scheme. The Prussian
minister Hardenberg in fact favoured very strict control because he did
not want to arouse the suspicion of the French; thus the poet Kleist’s
Berliner Abendbldtter (1810-11) was soon forbidden to publish political
articles. In Austria there had been no political discussion and there-
fore no independent press, though Metternich from his experience as
ambassador in Paris saw the importance of newspapers and wished to
use them as supporters of the interests of the regime. His main agent
in controlling the press was Friedrich von Gentz, who suggested to
Metternich the foundation of a political paper. The Oesterreichische
Beobachter, which had existed since 1810, was taken over, and Gentz
wrote the most important articles in it; although it was supposed to
have a certain amount of independence, it was in fact under very close
government control.
None of the German papers of the war years achieved any real
importance politically, though the periodicals fought out the literary
quarrels of the Romantics and their opponents. Some faint notes of
nationalism and Germanism were already to be heard from men like
R. Z. Becker, who published the National-Zeitung der Deutschen in
Gotha, and Joseph Gorres, originally a supporter of the Revolution, who
had turned as early as 1798-9 to criticism of the French regime and
whose publications were suppressed in consequence. The press first
won its right to speak for German opinion during the War of Libera-
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tion, though with only a bare and brief toleration from governments.
The Berlin papers were allowed by their own authorities to publish
nothing about the war. The new spirit of resistance to the French was
represented there by the Preussische Korrespondent (1813-14), directed
by Schleiermacher, Niebuhr and Achim von Amim, for which per-
mission was indeed granted, though there was considerable fear of the
result of adding to the number of papers published in Berlin since it was
difficult enough to control those which already existed. The most
important mouthpiece of German opinion in the years of Napoleon’s
fall was Gorres’s Rheinische Merkur, published in 1814 at Coblenz.
His attacks on Napoleon made a profound impression. After the peace
treaties had been made he demanded a strong Germany, denounced the
settlement of German destinies exclusively by the princes, and demanded
that the constitution of Prussia should rest on the people. His attacks
on the anti-national attitude of Bavaria and Wiirttemberg led to his
paper being banned in those states, and finally in January 1816 the
Prussian government suppressed the paper which now came under their
Rhineland jurisdiction.
A German scholar makes the point that gradually, as the press
developed, its freedom became thought of in Germany less as the in-
dividual right of the author or the reader and more as a collective
freedom belonging to the whole people, a natural expression of their
corporate personality. 1 The guarantee of freedom appears again in the
post-war constitutions as it had done in the Declaration of the Rights
of Man of 1789. The Norwegian Constitution of 1814 established the
freedom of the press among the general guarantees of life and property.
The right was secured in the Dutch Constitution of 1815 and in the Con-
stitution granted to the new Kingdom of Poland by Tsar Alexander I.
In Germany and Italy the hand of reactionary governments lay heavy
on all expressions of public opinion. In France the problem of public
opinion, as expressed in the press and in pamphlet literature, was one
of the primary internal problems of the Restoration period and is linked
very closely with allied questions such as those of the claims of the
Church, the rights of the religious congregations and the place of the
Papacy in the government of the Church. The Charter of 1814 had
granted freedom to publish and print opinions ‘in conformity with the
laws which may repress abuses of this liberty’. The qualifications here
implied were interpreted with differing degrees of strictness at different
times, but the law never seriously managed to restrain the great debate
on political principles which is central to French history under the
Restoration and which provided the primary training of the French
people in the practice of representative government. At the core of the
1 O. Groth, Die Geschichte der Deutschen Zeitungswissenschaft: Probleme und Methoden
(Munich, 1948), pp. iio-ii.
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debate lay the Revolution of 1789; its challenge could not be evaded:
was the system which the Revolution had established to be maintained
or was it to be overthrown? These questions were argued in the
Chambers; they were reported in the press. As the crisis of 1830 grew
nearer, the Liberals claimed that the Charter was the culmination of the
Revolution, that it meant that the Revolution had triumphed. The
Royalists beheved that this was a conspiracy and a crime and feared that
another outbreak was drawing near. Though there were shades of
opinion on both sides, the essential issue was a simple one. 1789 had
to be approved or rejected, and the press was at the very heart of the
great debate.
In the early years of the Restoration the law was hostile to any free
expression of opinion. In October 1814 a law had been passed which
decreed that no newspapers or other publications were to appear with-
out royal sanction and that no one should be a printer or a bookseller
without authorisation. After the Hundred Days a law on seditious
writings was passed by the Ultra-Royalist Chambre introuvable which
severely affected left-wing newspapers. Although the press legislation
was maintained and offending journalists were punished, criticism
gradually made itself heard more and more. In 1817 Guizot and Royer-
Collard founded the Archives philosophiques which demanded freedom
of the press and trial by jury for press offences; and other periodicals,
like the liberal Miner ve, were produced which escaped the censorship
by not appearing at regular intervals. In 1819 more liberal press laws
were passed, which required owners of newspapers to pay a con-
siderable sum in caution money but abolished the censorship and pro-
vided a jury trial for press offences. This interlude of comparative
Liberalism was brief. In the royalist reaction after the death of the
Due de Berry, the censorship was temporarily restored (1820) and in
1822 the courts were given power to prohibit or suspend papers of a
dangerous tendency, the definition of press offences was extended and
press cases were taken out of the hands of the jury. The Villele ministry
was exceptionally active in bringing newspapers and periodicals before
the courts; it embarked on a scheme to buy up opposition newspapers
and bring them under ministerial control ; it even restored the censorship,
though this was abolished by Charles X on his accession (1824), having
lasted for only a few weeks.
The French newspapers, like the English, were expensive and
burdened with a heavy stamp-duty. They did exercise great influence
on the small politically conscious class, and by the middle twenties the
opposition journals, like the Constitutionnel and the Journal des Debats,
which Chateaubriand had carried into opposition when he was dis-
missed from the government in 1824, were predominant. In 1826 they
each accounted for about 20,000 of the 65,000 subscribers to the
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political papers of Paris. The ministerial press totalled a mere 14,000.
In the reign of Charles X the great issue before press and public was
clericalism. The Liberals, excluded from the government after 1820,
turned their attention more and more to the religious question and
endeavoured to crack the alliance of throne and altar, their attack being
concentrated particularly on the Jesuits and on Ultramontanism. In
1825 the Constitutionnel was charged with ‘outrages against the religion
of the state’; it was acquitted and the court decided that no abuse v/as
caused by opposition to associations not authorised by the law. In
1826 the famous pamphlet of the Gallican aristocrat, the Comte de
Montlosier: Memoir e a consulter sur un systeme religieux et politique
tendant a renverser la religion, la societe et le trone was only the most
prominent among a crowd of pamphlets attacking the Jesuits and the
growth of clerical influence.
One of the principal counter-measures taken by Villele was the so-
called Taw of justice and love’ which increased the stamp duty and
enlarged the responsibility of printers and publishers. This raised
intense opposition and was withdrawn when the Chamber of Peers
seemed likely to reject it. In 1827 the censorship was re-imposed but was
abolished the next year by the Martignac ministry. Under his successor
Polignac, Thiers, Mignet and Carrel founded the National which aimed
at overthrowing the dynasty (January 1830); in February the Globe
was transformed into a political daily and actively attacked the king’s
policy. The July Ordinances again submitted papers to a ministerial
authorisation. Thiers and the Liberal journalists protested, and it was
the attempt of the government to seize the presses of the Globe, the
Temps and the National which sparked off the July Revolution.
In France and other countries alike both liberals and reactionaries
formed societies, shading over from the entirely law-abiding to the
secret organisations of which this was the great age. On the Catholic and
Royalist side were the Chevaliers de la Foi and the Congregation de la
Vierge in France, the Society of the Exterminating Angel in Spain, the
San Fedists of the Papal States. Among the public Liberal societies one
of the most successful and important was Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic
Association. In France the restoration of the press censorship in 1827
produced a ‘Society of Friends of the Liberty of the Press’ of which
Chateaubriand was president; and very soon afterwards was established
the society ‘Aid thyself and heaven will aid thee’, which contemplated
passive resistance and refusal to pay taxes and which was supported by
constitutionalists like Guizot and Broglie. Rather earlier, the secret
society known as the Charbonnerie, related to the Carbonari of Italy,
had been formed with the object of overthrowing the dynasty. It had
connexions with prominent Liberal intellectuals and deputies, and
branches in many departments, but insurrectionary outbreaks which
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it had created in 1822 were suppressed without difficulty. The line
between peaceful agitation and revolutionary conspiracy was easy to
cross. In Germany the Burschenschaften and Turnvereine — the student
societies and gymnastic clubs — were in their origin peaceful, but they
aroused deep fears in the governments, and an easy sequence of events
led from the Wartburgfest of 1817 to the murder of Kotzebue by the
student Karl Sand and the Carlsbad decrees of 1819. The Carbonari
were most powerful in Italy, the masonic lodges lay behind the Revolu-
tion of 1820 in Spain. The new tendencies spread even to the Russian
Empire. At the Polish University of Vilna student societies had grown
up advocating both nationalism and romanticism, the most important
of them being the Philomathians whose membership included the great
Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. In 1823 the leaders of the Philomathians
were arrested and banished to Russia. These Polish societies had been
influenced by the Burschenschaften. It was the influence of western
ideas in the Russian army too which produced secret groups like the
‘Union of Welfare’ whose ideas led to the Decembrist Revolution of
1825, the first revolutionary movement of modern Russia. If liberal
and revolutionary opinion was becoming more highly organised in this
way, so were the secret police of the absolute governments. The State
after 1815 had a far more acute idea than its eighteenth-century pre-
decessors about what was going on, and much more efficient means of
suppressing agitations it disliked and feared.
The story of the press in Germany and Italy after 1815 is part of the
general story of unrest and repression in those countries. The Carlsbad
Decrees of 1819 enforced preliminary censorship on all publications of
less than twenty sheets and provided that all printed materials should
bear the name of the publisher, while the States had to inform the
Bundestag of the measures which they had taken to carry out the
decrees. In Austria there was so little freedom that the decrees probably
made little difference. In Prussia the government did discuss more
liberal measures after 1815, but these came to nothing and in 1819 a
more rigid censorship edict was adopted. In the same year the
Allgemeine Preussische Staatszeitung was founded as an official paper,
but it achieved little importance. The Allgemeine Zeitung remained the
greatest of German papers but it was under the direct influence of
Mettemich and was severely censored, with the result that articles some-
times appeared only after considerable delay. Cotta had great difficul-
ties with the Bavarian censorship and his complaints received little
sympathy. In the early years after the war the greatest freedom was to
be found in some of the smaller States like Weimar. There the Opposi-
tionsblatt (1817) discussed constitutional and economic problems,
defended the universities and students after Kotzebue’s death and
criticised the repression in Prussia, though the paper, like other similar
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journals, soon came to an end. In the 1820’s the German press was in a
miserable state. Newspapers were too small and weak to be very
profitable. In 1816 the Leipzig publisher Brockhaus wrote to Oken that
Cotta kept the Allgemeine going because of his prestige, not because it
paid him to do so. In 1824 the paper had 3602 subscribers. Though
able journalists had appeared in Germany, there was little scope for
them, and men like Borne and Heine had to go abroad. Papers were
crudely composed of bits and pieces, and foreign news was often lifted
bodily from foreign journals. The editor’s task was made no easier
by the fact that the governments often made strict provisions that no
foreign news should be given which would be unpleasing to some
foreign government which they wished to conciliate. Nevertheless the
papers were slowly gaining ground despite all hindrances. As trade and
industrial freedom grew, advertisements became more important.
News began to travel more quickly, and in Berlin a daily post to and
from western Germany, Holland and France was organised. This made
it possible for the two Berlin papers the Vossische Zeitung and the
Spenersche Zeitung to go over in 1824 to daily publication; as the
editor of the Vossische wrote to the king, the public took a greater share
in political events, and trade and commerce were promoted through
daily advertisements. In 1823 the Spenersche introduced the first steam
press into Berlin. The collective circulation of papers in Prussia accord-
ing to the stamp returns was 35,516 in 1823; in 1830 it had risen to
41,049.
In many other European countries the position was no better than
it was in Germany. In Italy only literary journalism was possible. In
1818 a group at Milan who believed in a strong and united Italy
founded the Conciliatore, but this had to be given up under the pressure
of the Austrian government in the following year, though many of its
ideas were revived in the Annali Universali di Statistica. Very im-
portant also was the Antologia, founded in Florence in 1821, which
lasted until 1 833. In all these and similar reviews the need for a reformed
economic and cultural organisation of Italy was stressed; among the
contributors to the Antologia and to other periodicals was the young
Mazzini. In other countries in which repressive influences were less
powerful the press played an important part in the triumph of liberal
ideas. In Switzerland rigid control was maintained after 1815, and in
1823 Basel even forbade newspapers altogether. In the late ’twenties,
however, the press helped greatly in directing the rising tide of liberal-
ism through papers such as the Appenzeller Zeitung (1828) and the
Neue Zurcher Zeitung (1821). In the northern countries too conflicts
took place. Though the Dutch Constitution guaranteed the freedom of
the press, this right was limited by government decree and the Dutch
government punished the Belgian journalists who expressed the dis-
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content of the southern provinces. The situation worsened when the
Belgian Liberals, led by an able journalist, Louis de Potter, coalesced
with the Catholics. In 1828 the Belgian deputy Charles de Brouckere
failed to get the decree of 1815 on the press rescinded and in the same
year Potter was fined and imprisoned for an article in the Courrier
des Pays Bas. In the next year there was active petitioning in the
southern provinces of the Kingdom, freedom of the press being one of
the petitioners’ demands. Potter was still actively attacking the govern-
ment and in April 1830 he was banished after a newspaper article
advocating an association to assist those who resisted the government.
Press attacks on Dutch domination and prosecutions by the government
went on until revolution finally broke out in August 1830. In Sweden
too the government had been given in 1812 the power to suspend
offensive journals and this power was freely used. However the
opposition papers like Anmarkaren (1816-20) and Argus (1820-36)
grew in importance and advocated a liberal programme, the reform
of the four-chamber Riksdag and the achievement of parliamentary
government.
Political Liberalism was one of the main currents of thought, now
rushing, now eddying, through the channels of European thought and
action. After 1815 the Liberal exiles wove an international bond of
sympathy and idealism between the peoples of many countries, as in a
very different way had the French emigres of an earlier generation.
Liberalism was not the only international movement. Bible Societies
for extending the circulation of the Scriptures spread from England,
where the British and Foreign Bible Society was founded in 1804, to
many other countries, and were warmly encouraged for a time by
Tsar Alexander I. In literary and cultural circles this was the age of the
triumphs of Romanticism. Its political sympathies were on the whole
Conservative, its ideal lay in the harmonious and hierarchic order of the
medieval past. It affected all European countries but its real centre was
Germany and its triumph placed Germany in the very centre of European
thought. This was the great age too of the Idealist philosophy. From
Kant the succession had passed to Fichte, to Hegel, to Schelling. Both
Romanticism and Idealism were creeds of the group. Man was con-
sidered not as an isolated rational individual but as a member of a
traditional folk-group, of a nation with a heritage as much emotional
as rational. To the philosopher true individuality lay not in isolation
but in the acceptance and fulfilment of man’s place in a moral universe,
identified by Hegel with the secular state. The eighteenth century
was an age of great individuals, the nineteenth century an age of
corporate and national effort. For the mass of mankind greater freedom
and more equal privileges might be demanded, but they were seen within
a social context, historical, political or cultural. The veneration for the
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past is to be seen in a more reverent examination of its records. In
France the Ecole des Chartes dates from 1821 ; the great German source-
collection Monumenta Germaniae Historica began to appear in 1826.
In the contemporary world, opinion was recognised as a great social
force; politically its most important expression, as we have seen, was
through the press ; socially and culturally men saw the school and the
university as the keys to a new world based on a more profound appreci-
ation of human personality.
One vital thread is that of freedom and moral spontaneity. It must
be the duty of the society and of the school not to drill the child into
dead and sterile knowledge, but to release the power of independent
life and power within him. The idea is primarily Rousseau’s, though he
had applied it principally to the development of the individual. The
task of the nineteenth century was to apply his ideas not only to the
favoured few but to the whole mass of the people. Freiherr vom Stein
in his Nassauer Denkschrift of 1807 speaks of elevating the people so
that they may take a real part in the work of the state. The Prussian
reformers found the means to their hand in the work of Johann Hein-
rich Pestalozzi (1746-1827). After early failures, he first achieved
success in teaching a group of children at Stanz who had been orphaned
during the disturbances connected with the Revolution of 1798 in
Switzerland. He later ran several schools and, as his fame grew,
especially in Germany, pupils came to him from all over Europe. He
was a practical man, not a philosopher, and his fundamental idea was
that education should start with the child himself and not with some
abstract theory of what the child might eventually be expected to
become. The fundamental approach was by sense-impression; once
the wheel is set going the children will help themselves because the vital
part of all education is self-development. ‘All instruction of man,’ he
wrote, ‘is then only the Art of helping Nature to develop in her own
way; and this Art rests essentially on the relation and harmony between
the impressions received by the child and the exact degree of his
developed powers.’ 1 Whereas Rousseau in Emile had been discussing
an individual situation, Pestalozzi is concerned for the ordinary people
and for raising the general level of their life. His idea of education
is a profoundly social one. The human race needs the same as the
single child needs, and the poor man’s child needs better instruction
than the rich man’s.
Pestalozzi’s ideas were adopted by Fichte in his Addresses to the
German Nation ; they influenced Prussian officials who were concerned
with educational policy and teachers who had to administer it. They
provided the fundamental inspiration for the belief that it is the duty
1 J. H. Pestalozzi, How Gertrude teaches her children, trans. L. E. Holland and F. C.
Turner, ed. E. Cooke, 4th edn. (London, 1907), p. 26.
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of the state to teach its people to read and write, not only for utilitarian
reasons but also — and far more important — because it is the duty of the
state to release new power in its citizens, power to become more com-
plete and developed human beings than they were before. Pestalozzi’s
work was known in England (a translation of some of his early letters
was published in 1827), but even when no direct connexion of cause and
effect can be proved, the same idea of freedom, spontaneity and the
release of power also ran through the English thinkers of the same
period. Bentham’s ideas about education are more strictly practical
than Pestalozzi’s, but in the Utilitarian school the same sense of
freedom and self-activity is to be found, particularly in James Mill.
No class ought to be excluded from education, he says, because it
exists to communicate the art of happiness. Though knowledge,
morality and happiness may not be exactly conjoined in any one
individual, they certainly are so conjoined in classes and nations.
The same note is struck in the most important of the English educa-
tional thinkers of this period, Robert Owen. Convinced of the truth of
the eighteenth-century tradition that men’s characters are formed by their
environment, he believed that the best governed state would be that
which had devoted the most care to the education of its citizens. Such
education must, he thought, teach them to become rational beings, a
task which existing systems of popular education had hardly attempted.
The problem was a practical one: ‘Train any population rationally and
they will be rational. Furnish honest and useful employments to those
so trained, and such employments they will greatly prefer to dishonest or
injurious occupations.’ 1 But such honest and useful employments do
not lie at once to hand for poor and ignorant men. The State must
take the chief hand in the work. Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, one of
the founders of the English system of popular education, came to the
same conclusion; he saw education as an important remedy for the
misery of the Manchester workers in 1832: ‘The ignorant are, therefore,
properly the care of the State.’ 2
The search for freedom and self-development was for Pestalozzi and
for Owen primarily concerned with the education of the people. In
secondary and higher education the same goal was pursued by German
thinkers, particularly Wilhelm von Humboldt. The traditions of
German higher education in the eighteenth century were mainly
practical ; the universities existed to prepare men for state service. In the
early years of the new century men like Fichte and the theologian
Schleiermacher began to plan a new university in Berlin which should
be devoted not to producing bureaucrats but to the higher culture of the
1 R. Owen, A New View of Society, 3rd edn. (London, 1817), p. 65.
1 Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, Four Periods of Public Education as reviewed in 1832-
1839-1846-1862 (London, 1862), p. 60.
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mind. The defeat of Jena must have seemed disastrous to their plans;
in fact it made Prussians think much more deeply of the future of their
State. Clearly new resources had to be created; some of them would
be material but others were to be spiritual. The State must tap new
spiritual reserves; it must make up in spiritual force what it had lost
in material. These ideas were not peculiar to Wilhelm von Humboldt,
who was head of the Department of Religion and Education in the
Ministry of the Interior, 1809-10, but he exemplified them more fully
than any other of his contemporaries. He was himself devoted to per-
sonal development and freedom and he believed that education must
be based at every stage on the fullest development of individuality
possible. The great force in his mind, and in the minds of his great
contemporaries in the German literary world like Herder, Goethe and
Schiller, was that of the Greek. It was in the study of the Greek world,
not merely the word-splitting and pedantry of ‘classical education’
in the narrow sense, but in the appreciation of its language, history,
culture, art as a whole, that men like the great philologist F. A. Wolf found
the key to full self-development. This was the way to complete harmony,
to realisation of the fact that man is valuable not for what he knows or
can do, but for what he is. The ideal of the New Humanism, originally
that of an aristocratic minority, was brought by Humboldt into the
main stream of higher and secondary education. His direct responsi-
bility in an official post was of very short duration ; the effect of his work
was permanent.
Education to him and to those who thought like him was the key to
the moral resources of the nation. The new university of Berlin,
inaugurated in October 1810, was designed to spread Prussian influence
throughout Germany and to develop the spirit of the whole German
nation. Although it was a state institution, the traditional corporate
organisation of the faculties was maintained and some autonomy was
preserved. Academically the standard of Berlin was high from the first.
In other States many of the ancient universities were reformed at
much the same time. Heidelberg was reorganised in 1802-3 by the
government of Baden. In Bavaria King Ludwig I established in 1826 a
university at Munich which became a counterpart to Berlin in the
Catholic South. In their newly acquired western provinces the Prussian
government founded the University of Bonn in 1818. In these and
other German universities modern standards of university study and
research were worked out. The professors were savants devoted to the
pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. The emphasis lay on inde-
pendent study and research instead of mechanical learning by rote. In
every department of scholarship — in classical philology and history, in
Germanic studies, in law, in philosophy, in history and in science —
the Germans stood pre-eminent. Among the many students who came
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from other lands were Edward Everett and George Ticknor, who
arrived at Gottingen in 1 8 1 5 — the first of the great succession of American
scholars.
The intellectual stimulus which had revitalised the German universi-
ties also profoundly affected the secondary schools. New Humanism
was again the predominant influence, and it was the philologists who
really set the tone. Out of the old Latin schools gradually developed the
gymnasia, the secondary schools, which had the right to prepare
students for the university. In Prussia a teachers’ examination for
secondary schools was adopted in 1810; gradually an independent
teaching profession separate from the clergy came into existence. In
1812 the final school-leaving examination which dated originally from
1788 was reorganised, and in the same year a standard plan of gymna-
sium studies was adopted, based on a ten-year course of Latin, Greek,
German and Mathematics, designed to provide an all-round education.
In 1817 a separate Ministry of Education was set up and in 1825 the
local educational ad m inistration was separated from the religious
consistories. The development was not entirely harmonious — a project
for a general school law covering primary and secondary education
came to nothing in 1819; but by the death of King Frederick William
III in 1840, the Minister, von Altenstein, and his assistant Johannes
Schulze had perfected and completed the organisation of the Prussian
gymnasium in its studies and personnel. With local variations — for
instance the Bavarian curricula under the influence of Friedrich
Thiersch were more purely classical in inspiration than the Prussian—
development of the same sort happened in the other German states.
In a period of reaction such as that between 1815 and 1830 govern-
ments were naturally very suspicious of academic free thought or free
speech. The effects of the reforms made in Prussia and the other
German states had been to increase their power over the universities
and schools. Humboldt and others of his generation had been genuinely
devoted to self-expression and personal freedom, though they had seen
the activity of the State as the only way of achieving those objectives.
Under their successors the balance tipped away from personal freedom
and towards state control. Humboldt had wished the University of
Berlin to have its own independent revenues. His successor, von
Schuckmann, opposed this because it reduced the State’s control over
the University and caused the idea to be set aside, von Altenstein
declared that the universities were not states within a state and that
they were to have nothing to do with matters affecting the general
political situation. In the 1820’s a number of edicts were issued in
Prussia regulating the private reading of schoolboys, ordering them to
study ‘true’ and not ‘superficial’ philosophy and decreeing that class
teachers should supervise the activities of their pupils and make a
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report on them which was passed on after they had left school. It is
not surprising that the activities of the state, though in one sense
assisting and developing educational provision, were in another
cramping and deadening.
German writers of the revolutionary period had seen the role of the
nation in a literary or a cosmopolitan context, with Germany playing
its part among the nations in an international activity of culture and
good will. Such ideas lie behind Fichte’s Addresses to the German
Nation (1807), one of the main literary documents of rising German
nationalism. Fichte believed that the way to rebuild the nation lay
through the adoption of a national system of education which would
affect not merely the cultured class but the whole people. The way to
achieve this he believed he had found in the ideas of Pestalozzi. The
approach to it and the business of carrying it out was the duty of the
State, which had got into its present position through its neglect of
religion and morality. Opposition there might be, but in taking this
course the State would be introducing nothing more radical than the
system of compulsory military service which was already in force. The
comparison is an interesting one. In fact the duty of the citizen to go to
school is closely related to his duty to serve in the army and to pay his
taxes. The contradiction is unavoidable between a genuine belief in
personal and creative activity and an equally profound conviction that
the educational system must produce a fixed and unalterable type in
morals and behaviour, the type which has independently been defined
as the correct or valid one. Much of the academic opinion of Germany
after 1815 was Liberal, not only among students but among professors
too; in 1819 the Berlin professor de Wette was dismissed after the death
of Kotzebue because of his connexions with the family of Sand,
Kotzebue’s murderer. Early Liberal leaders were professors like
Rotteck of Freiburg and Dahlmann of Kiel, Gottingen and Bonn.
Yet there was a persistent tradition among German intellectuals that
the free creative spirit was above the everyday concerns of common
politics. ‘I do not trouble myself about political matters,’ wrote Hum-
boldt to Goethe in 1798, 1 and the tradition persisted. Madame de
Stael acutely pointed out the activity of German thinkers in intellectual
affairs and their sluggishness in political ones. The genius of the nation
in philosophical matters has been pushed to the furthest limit, but as a
result there is no real object for men ‘who do not rise to the elevation of
the most rash conceptions. In Germany, a man who is not occupied
with the comprehension of the whole universe, has really nothing to
do’. 2 Into the gap so left the State could march in unresisted and take
full possession.
1 F. Meinecke, Weltbiirgertum und Nationalstaat (Munich and Berlin, 1908), p. 52.
* Mme de Stael, Germany. Eng. trans., 3 vols. (London, 1813), vol. 1, p. 172.
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The most logical development of state activity in the educational
field is to be seen however in Napoleonic France. Both the thinkers of
the eighteenth century and the statesmen of the Revolution had seen
education as a major function of the State, though the revolutionary
assemblies had produced little more than a series of interesting projects.
Education came naturally under the care of the First Consul who was
restoring the institutions of France. He found himself in a revolutionary
situation when everything was in flux, master of a growing empire with-
out imperial institutions. He wanted the schools to train the creators
of a new type of society. The spirit he wished to inculcate was that of
order and devotion to his regime. He could hardly expect this to be
universally accepted among his contemporaries, but he might hope to
direct the mi n ds of their sons. In achieving his aims he was very
ready to make use of the Catholic religion, but entirely on his own
terms. He was always to be the master. His aims were clear. What
was needed was a teaching body with fixed principles. Without such
principles the State could never form a nation and would be subject
to continual disorder and change. A way must be found to direct
political and moral opinion.
His plans took some time to work out. The first step was the Law of
1 1 Floreal, an X (i May 1802) which created a lycee at the seat of each
court of appeal. These were to be chiefly boarding schools and were to
give a large number of scholarships to the sons of soldiers and officials.
These took the place of the e coles centrales, and were similar in form to
the Prytanee, a central boarding institution in Paris which had also been
established by the Directory. In addition, either the communes or
private individuals might set up secondary schools, though private
people needed authorisation to do so. Primary education was practically
ignored; there was little interest and no money. If the schools were to
fulfil their purpose in the Napoleonic scheme of things they needed a
national organisation which would depend entirely on the State. The
idea went back to pre-revolutionary thinkers like Turgot and the
parliamentarian Rolland. It represented in a laicised form the idea of
the Jesuits which certainly influenced Napoleon, though the men’s
teaching congregations were in general uncongenial to him because of
their dependence on an external authority in Rome. Napoleon appears
first to have formulated the idea of such a teaching corporation in
February 1805. The formation of the University was decreed in 1806
and it was set up in 1808. The University was a lay teaching corpora-
tion with a hierarchic organisation and a strict discipline. At its head and
dependent on the Emperor stood the Grand Master and the Council.
Beneath this central organisation France was divided into ‘Academies’
each presided over by a Rector. The Grand Master and Council laid
down methods of instruction and the teacher might teach only what the
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government programmes included. Private education was not sup-
pressed, it was incorporated in the great institution which was planned
to link all higher and secondary teachers together so that they should
all feel themselves to be members of one body and bound together in a
chain stretching from the lowliest position in the school to the highest
in the State. The basis of the teaching, according to the decree of 1808,
was to be the precepts of the Catholic faith, fidelity to the emperor and
the imperial dynasty, and obedience to the university statutes which
aimed at producing citizens ‘attached to their religion, to their prince,
to their fatherland and to their family’.
The spirit of the new institutions was in fact Catholic and Con-
servative. Fourcroy, having been concerned with education since 1801,
but having had a revolutionary past, was not appointed Grand Master.
That post went to the Catholic-minded Fontanes, and the atmosphere
of the Council was strongly anti-revolutionary. It was natural therefore
that Catholic influence was strong in the schools and that much effort
was devoted to maintaining religious orthodoxy. However the private
schools, which were generally Catholic schools, suffered a good deal
under the regime. They were forced to pay a proportion of their fees
into the funds of the University, and they were required, at least in
theory, to send their pupils to attend courses in the lycees and colleges
(the communal secondary schools). Stricter rules regulating private
schools were made in 18 11, and measures were adopted then to control
the ‘petits seminaires’, the schools preparatory to the diocesan semin-
aries for priests, which in fact received many pupils who were not going
to be ordained.
In higher education Napoleon preserved the professional schools
which had been set up during the Revolution. The Ecole Normale
which had existed briefly in 1795 to train men for the higher posts in
secondary education was re-established in 1808. Apart from these
schools higher education was in the hands of the faculties of theology,
law, medicine, science, and letters, the purpose of which was entirely
practical — to train men for state service and to ensure that officials were
ready when needed. A similar purpose lay behind the institution in
1808 of the baccalaureat, a school examination designed to open the way
to civil functions. It is interesting to note that at the time when
university education in Germany was being broadened and expanded,
it was in France primarily directed to purely utilitarian ends. The
Napoleonic government did indeed display real interest in the sciences.
During the early decades of the century France was in fact in the
lead of scientific thought in Europe (Chapter V). The curricula of
the ecoles centrales set up by the Directory had been strongly scien-
tific. But in these matters Napoleon took a middle course between the
newer ideas and the classicism of the old order, and the teaching pro-
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grammes tended to favour the ancient languages. They were oriented
too to maintain the security of the regime. The emperor’s hatred
of critical thought showed itself, for instance, in the suppression in 1803
of the class of moral sciences in the Institui de France founded in 1795.
The same system of state control survived the upheavals of 1814-15
and was continued by the revived Bourbon monarchy. The main
problems of this later period were connected with religion and personal
freedom, and are most easily considered under that head. Even more
rigid state control was to be found in the countries of eastern and
southern Europe. In Italy the French administration had reformed the
University of Naples and established a normal school for teachers at
Pisa. After 1815 these reforms were undone and the normal school
closed. In the Austrian Empire a particularly close control over teachers
and syllabuses was maintained. The emperor told the professors of the
gymnasium at Laibach in 1821 that ‘there are now new ideas going
about, which I never can nor will approve. Avoid them and keep to
what is positive. For I need no savants, but worthy citizens. To form
the youth into such citizens is your task. He who serves me must teach
what I order. He who cannot do so, or who comes with new ideas, can
go, or I shall remove him’. 1 As the reign of Alexander I drew to its
close, similar ideas were becoming more and more powerful in the
Russian Empire. At the beginning of his reign much had been done
for education. The funds available were greatly increased, a depart-
ment of education was set up, new universities created at Kharkov and
Kazan, and an institute of pedagogy founded at St Petersburg which
became a university in 1819. In 1804 a university statute was promul-
gated which gave the universities considerable autonomy and placed
them each at the head of one of the educational districts into which the
country was divided. A generous policy was also followed in the
Kingdom of Poland. A Chamber of Education had already been
founded in the new French-controlled Duchy of Warsaw in 1807,
which did much for primary and secondary schools, and in 1816-17 a
new university was established at Warsaw. However the growing
stringency of reaction after 1815 undid much of this good work.
The censorship was tightened up, the Ministry of Education was
combined with the office of the Holy Synod, the universities were care-
fully watched and some of their professors were dismissed. The
universities of both Vilna and Warsaw were closed after the Polish
rising of 1830-1. The ideas of the new Tsar Nicholas I are shown by
a statute of 1828 which separated the district schools from the gymnasia,
and decreed that the latter were to be open only to the children of nobles
and officials. Education might become dangerous if class distinctions
were not maintained, a point which must be expanded later.
1 R. W. Seton-Watson, A History of the Czechs and Slovaks (London, 1943), p. 165.
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In contrast to all these countries stood England and the United
States, still culturally an English colony. In both alike education had
been left to private initiative and to philanthropic activity. The New
England States of the Union had an old tradition of concern for these
matters, but progress in developing a primary school system throughout
the republic was necessarily slow. The colleges — Harvard, Yale and
their younger sisters — were still limited in their resources and aims. The
only important leader of the new nation who had both thought deeply
about educational subjects and taken a practical interest in them was
Thomas Jefferson. Throughout his career he had hoped to create a
comprehensive structure in Virginia leading from the primary schools
through the higher schools to the university. He was the father of the
University of Virginia, incorporated by the State legislature in 1819.
He planned its lay-out; he went to great pains to recruit able professors,
often from overseas; he was anxious that the university should be run
on the most liberal lines and the students were given a freedom in
choosing their courses which was unknown in America at that time.
By 1830, however, the distinctive traditions of American education were
only beginning to form (Vol. X, pp. 116-7).
In England the State had failed to exert any real control over its
educational institutions under the Stuarts. After 1688 it had given up the
attempt. Englishmen believed in leaving the task either to ancient
independent corporations or to the efforts of private individuals. In
the first category came the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and
the ancient grammar schools. All alike had many weaknesses, though
before 1830 the great nineteenth-century reforms were already being
foreshadowed. At Oxford a new examination statute had been adopted
in 1800, and at Cambridge the high standard of the Mathematical
Tripos did create an exacting though narrow road to honours. Criticism
was becoming heard, more especially from the advocates of the Scottish
universities, which were both cheap and efficient. In the schools the
pioneers of the great generation of public school headmasters were
already at work. Samuel Butler went to Shrewsbury in 1798 and Thomas
Arnold to Rugby in 1828. The old universities and grammar schools
were Anglican in religion, and the existence of the religious tests was
one important reason for the creation of the non-sectarian ‘London
University’ in 1828, the foundation college of the modern University of
London. The State too was beginning to exercise a greater influence.
The Utilitarians worked in that direction, for education, as Bentham
held, ‘is only government acting by means of the domestic magistrate’.
The Select Committee of 1816 on the education of the poor uncovered
many abuses in the management of charitable trusts and led to later
legislation for more effective control. In 1827 a commission was
issued for visiting the Scottish universities and, although no action was
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taken on its report until 1858, it prefigured the later enquiries into
Oxford and Cambridge. In elementary education a general system of
parochial schools had been proposed by Whitbread in 1807 and,
although in England the State took no direct action to assist primary
education before 1830, in Ireland, often a laboratory for trying out new
forms of state activity, state grants in aid to the Kildare Place Society
go back to 1815. It was clear to Englishmen by the early years of the
nineteenth century that the education of the people was an enormous
problem. If the State was not to take on the work itself, the only other
agencies powerful enough to do so were the churches.
The traditional connexion between the Church and education was
very strong, in England as in other countries, and it had not been
eroded away, as in eighteenth-century Germany, by the growing power
of the State. The classic English type of organisation by private
individuals, combining central organisation with local initiative, went
back in the educational field to the Society for Promoting Christian
Knowledge, founded in 1698, which in its early years was very active in
establishing charity schools. Sunday schools, also founded by private
effort, had started to develop in the 1780’s. All nineteenth-century
Englishmen with very few exceptions agreed that education should be
religious at its core. Some important thinkers like Owen and Bentham
were secularists, but secularist ideas had very little influence on the
majority of the nation. But, if most people agreed that religion was to
be the basis of education, there were many different opinions as to its
content. The sharpest division was between Church and Dissent,
and in this period the influence of Dissent was growing. In 1828,
with the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, Dissenters finally
achieved political and social equality. The religious question in
English elementary education is too often reduced to a simple pattern —
‘Church v. Dissent’: the division between the strictly denominational
and the laxer undenominational viewpoint does not exactly coincide
with the division between Churchman and Dissenter. It is certainly true,
however, that the two societies, the National Society (1811), inspired
by the Anglican clergyman Andrew Bell, and the British and Foreign
Society (1814), inspired by the Quaker Joseph Lancaster, did stand, the
one for a more strictly doctrinal, the other for a more undenominational
attitude to the education of the people. It is true also that, as the
societies gathered way, the divisions between them tended to become
sharper, and the issue of denominational rivalry more exacerbated.
Lancaster’s plans, Mrs Trimmer wrote to Bell in 1805, were an organised
attempt to ‘ educate the whole body of the common people, without any
regard to the religion of the nation '. 1 The foundation of the National
1 R. and C. C. Southey, Life of the Rev. Andrew Bell (London, 1844), vol. n,
p. 136.
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Society itself was precipitated by a charity sermon at St Paul’s, warning
churchmen that they must stand together to promote the welfare of the
Establishment. The two societies had by 1830 made a considerable
impact on the mass of illiteracy which existed in the country, though there
was still a vast amount left to do. How much the progress of primary
education in England was held up by religious rivalries it is very
difficult to assess. It is certain that, at a time when the State was not
itself likely to take any active part, without the societies nothing would
have been done at all.
In England religious rivalries were fought out by the churches them-
selves with the state in the background as the arbiter. In some other
countries of Europe the conflict involved the state itself in its relations
with the church, and so illustrated one facet of the struggle between
individuals or groups and a state organisation growing constantly more
powerful. In Napoleonic France the Catholic religion had been defined
as one of the fundamental bases of teaching, but there was really little
understanding between the state and the religious point of view.
Despite attempts to catholicise the schools, the Catholic bourgeoisie
tended to regard the state schools as irreligious, and the lycees were
filled with the sons of civil and military officials who had grown up in an
anti-clerical atmosphere and had little use for religion. Under the
Restoration the general attitude of Catholic opinion was not to demand
the end of the state monopoly and the right to run Catholic schools
independently of the state, but to endeavour to bring the existing
system under closer Catholic control. In fact the question of state
monopoly and educational liberty aroused comparatively little interest
until the very last years of the Bourbon regime.
The great issue confronting opinion in France between 1815 and 1830
was, as has been seen in another context, much less liberty than
clericalism. It was in the schools that the Catholic reaction enjoyed
some of its main triumphs. In 1 822 the office of Grand Master was re-
established and given to Mgr Frayssinous, Bishop of Hermopolis, who
became minister of ecclesiastical affairs (to which public instruction
was attached) in 1824. The Ecole Normale was suppressed in 1822 and
Guizot and Victor Cousin suspended from their professorial chairs. In
1824 primary education, in which the Restoration showed far greater
interest than Napoleon had done, was put under the control of the
bishops. The petits seminaires were growing in number and popularity,
and the Jesuits were filtering back into teaching posts. When the Villele
government was replaced by that of Martignac, the Ordinances of
1828 severely limited the pretensions of the Church in educational
matters. The bishops lost a great part of their control over the primary
schools. Teaching by members of unauthorised congregations, which
really meant by the Jesuits, was forbidden. Restrictions were placed
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on the petits seminaires. If the State would not support the claims of the
Church, what attitude were Catholics to take ? In general they moved
towards demanding educational freedom which would enable them to
train their children in schools which to them seemed suitable. The
interests of the Church, as the Catholic thinker Lamennais now claimed,
demanded liberty of education, of conscience and of the press. Liberals
might have been expected to share the same point of view. In fact they
were too frightened of the influence of the clergy, especially of the
Jesuits, to be entirely consistent in their Liberalism.
In the United Netherlands the problem was further complicated by
the conflict between the Catholic Church and a Protestant government,
between the Dutch and the French languages, and between the national
feelings of the Dutch and the Belgians. The government of the Batavian
Republic had adopted in 1806 a very comprehensive and effective law
on primary education, which included religious instruction of a very
broad and undogmatic kind in the spirit of the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment. Though the Dutch government after 1815 did not at
once introduce this law into the Catholic Belgian provinces, it did take
great interest in elementary education there, with resulting difficulties
about school books and about the language to be used in the class-room.
The official policy of introducing Dutch as the state language in the
Flemish provinces of the south was also very unpopular. King William I
was very anxious to control both the Catholic and Protestant Churches
in the interest of state unity, and his ecclesiastical policy was really
Napoleonic in inspiration. The Dutch government was generally hostile
to Catholicism and had a good deal of trouble with the hierarchy.
One obvious area of friction lay in the education of the clergy, which the
government wished to control. In 1825 the closing of the petits semin-
aires — as in France, the clerical schools preparatory to the diocesan
seminaries — was decreed. Candidates for the priesthood were to attend
the state schools and then go on to a collegium philosophicum at
Louvain, from which they were to proceed to the seminaries proper. It
was further decreed that no priest educated abroad was to hold an
ecclesiastical post in the kingdom. As feeling rose in Belgium against
the Dutch connexion in the later twenties, the educational question
was an important source of the trouble. Freedom of education as well
as freedom of the press was one of the demands of the petitioners in the
southern provinces in 1829. In 1828 the Belgian Catholics and Liberals
made a concordat for common action. The Liberals were encouraged
by the fall of the Villele ministry in France. The Catholics were in-
fluenced by the example of O’Connell in Ireland and by the new turn in the
ideas of Lamennais. The attacks in the Belgian press on Dutch policy
in 1828-30 have already been sketched. In 1830 the government gave
up the collegium philosophicum and made concessions over the schools
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and the use of the French language, but these came too late to save the
tie between North and South (Chapter XVII. a).
It would of course be an exaggeration to suggest that Church and
State were bitter rivals everywhere. In Scandinavia, in Austria and the
German States they worked very closely together. Victor Cousin, in
his report on German education (1833) 1 speaks of the strength of
confessional influences in Germany and, though he considered that in
Prussia the clerical spirit was weaker and the governmental spirit more
powerful than in the other States, the idea of state authority itself was
strongly imbued with religious sanctions. Prussian thinkers saw God
and Fatherland as correlative powers and tended to equate orthodoxy
with obedience. Cousin’s report shows that the Prussian clergy co-
operated actively in primary education, and he considered this to be
one of the chief reasons for the prosperous condition of the Prussian
primary schools. Among other reasons for this he cited the collabora-
tion between the state and the local authorities in school management,
and the principle of compulsory attendance, reiterated in the Allgemeines
Landrecht of 1794, which had also made liberal arrangements in
religious matters, ruling that children of a different faith were not to be
obliged to accept the religious instruction provided. One especially
important instrument in improving the educational standard both of
teachers and of pupils was the foundation of numerous teachers’
training colleges. Between 1808 and 1826 seventeen new colleges were
established, and these were really the spearheads of advance. Accord-
ing to the statistics of 1831 the primary schools of the kingdom con-
tained 99 per cent of the estimated number (some two million) of
children aged seven to fourteen. In Austria the standard reached was
much lower than in many of the German States, but school ordinances
had been made by Maria Theresa, by Joseph II, and by Francis II
(Constitution of the German Schools, 1 805), and in the Austrian crown
lands a considerable proportion of the children received at least some
education.
Two other countries in which the government intervened with vigour
and success were Holland and Denmark. In the former considerable
efforts had been made through private initiative to improve the educa-
tion of the people in the years before 1789. In 1798 a department of
education was set up in the new Batavian Republic. The law on
primary education already mentioned formed the permanent basis of
the Dutch system. No one was allowed to teach unless he could
produce a certificate of competence and a call to a particular school.
Each district had a superintendent and all the superintendents formed
the provincial board of public instruction. The general code for the
1 V. Cousin, De t' instruction publique dans quelques pays de I'Allemagne et particular ement
en Prusse, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1840).
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schools was issued by the Ministry of the Interior. When the French
scientist Cuvier visited Holland in 1811, he found that almost all
children were in schools (though education was not compulsory), that
the masters were excellent and well-paid, and that the system of in-
spection was highly efficient. The creation of a national system in
Denmark was originally an offshoot of the reforming impulse which had
reorganised Danish rural society. The Great School Commission, which
sat from 1789 to 1814, drew up a system for rural schools which was
put into effect for the island dioceses in 1806 and for the whole kingdom
in 1814. Attendance at the primary schools was made compulsory from
the age of seven to confirmation — usually at fourteen (Chapter XVII. b).
England’s main contributions to the educational practice of the time
were infant schools, in which Owen was a pioneer, and the mutual or
Lancasterian system. This system, after the end of the Napoleonic
wars, had a great though short-lived influence in Denmark. Alex-
ander I of Russia was interested in it, it was employed in Switzerland
by the Dominican educationalist, Father Girard of Fribourg, and
it spread widely in the United States. The mutual system had
probably been adopted independently by both Bell and Lancaster,
though there was much controversy as to its true originator. Bell,
when a chaplain at Madras, had become superintendent of a childrens’
asylum. Since he found the masters incompetent, he gradually began
to get the more advanced boys to teach the others. Once the idea
had caught on, the master could, by the use of the senior boys or
monitors for passing on his questions, checking the answers, examin-
ing the other boys and so on, supervise a very large number of pupils
at once. Joseph Lancaster claimed for the system that ‘on this plan,
any boy who can read, can teach', and the inferior boys may do the work
usually done by the teachers, in the common mode: for a boy who can
read, can teach, although he knows nothing about if} The advantage
of the method was, of course, that it was extremely cheap and made
possible the beginnings of a general school system with very small
resources. Its great drawbacks were that it was rigid and artificial —
and so in opposition to the great movement of educational freedom
represented by Pestalozzi — and that it did not really recognise the impor-
tance and complexity of the work of the teacher. It is not surprising that,
when Bell visited Pestalozzi, although he admired him personally he
thought that he should dismiss four-fifths of his masters.
The Lancasterian system was a blind alley and was ultimately
abandoned everywhere. It did however help to promote interest in
primary education in France. The Societe pour V amelioration de Ven-
seignement elementaire, founded in 1815, which showed great activity
1 The Practical Parts of Lancaster's 'Improvements' and Bell's 'Experiment', ed. D.
Salmon (Cambridge, 1932), p. 33.
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in founding schools, favoured it; in 1821 the society’s report showed that
it was used in over 1500 schools, though after this the number declined.
The system was not used in the schools run by the religious congrega-
tions, the most famous of which was the Brethren of the Christian
Schools. The government showed considerable interest in elementary
education in general. In 1816 an appropriation of 50,000 francs was
granted, which rose to 100,000 in 1829 and to 300,000 francs in 1830.
By that date about half the communes in France had some sort of
school, and in 1833 a general primary school law was enacted.
By that date the shadow of industrialism was already moving over
Europe, though it had lengthened as yet only over Britain. The Bell-
Lancaster methods bore already some of the marks of an industrial
civilisation. The mutual system itself was a sort of educational mass
production. The connection between division of labour and mechanisa-
tion of plant both in industry and in education was in fact stressed a
great deal at the time. Bell said of his method that Tike the steam
engine, or spinning machinery, it diminishes labour and multiplies
work’. 1 Bentham, whose ideas on educational matters were closely
affected by Lancaster and Bell, wrote in Chrestomathia of ‘profit
maximised, expense minimised’. 2 Owen’s very different ideas were seen
in the first theory of education designed for the conditions of an indus-
trial society. He saw that, if education was to be effective, it must not
end with the child, and he wanted to provide further instruction for
adults through evening lectures. The same idea lay behind the
Mechanics’ Institutes which grew up in Great Britain in the 1820’s,
and the Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge, founded in
1827 under the inspiration of Henry Brougham, for the dissemination of
useful literature. But here literacy might run very close to politics.
If men could read, they might criticise, and the official view in England
as everywhere in Europe was, as Lord Kenyon said, that any criticism
was likely To make the people discontented with the Constitution under
which they live’. 3 A correspondent wrote to Bell in 1809 about the
danger that popular education which was not based on fixed tenets
might ‘give birth to the most latitudinarian principles, both in religion
and government’. 4 It is noteworthy that Bentham himself had found
it necessary in Chrestomathia to deny that better education of the
people would lead to the breakdown of social distinctions and had cited
both Scotland and Germany as examples to the contrary.
The Germans were less sure of their own immunity, having their own
fears on the subject, von Altenstein, the Prussian minister of education,
1 The Practical Parts of Lancaster's 'Improvements' and. . . . Bell's 'Experiment', p. 69.
* Works, ed. J. Bowring (Edinburgh, 1843), vol. vm, p. 25.
* W. H. Wickwar, The Struggle for the Freedom of the Press, 1819-32 (London, 1928),
p. 26.
4 R. and C. C. Southey, Andrew Bell, vol. n, pp. 599-600.
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did not believe that a system of primary education which gave the
common people more than the bare necessaries of knowledge would
raise them out of their proper sphere. His sovereign Frederick William
III admitted that he himself was quite confused. Had popular education
its proper limits or not? If so, what were the limits to be? If not, then
there could be no restraint at all. The problem with which the king
was struggling affected the whole of European society and extended far
beyond the bounds within which the king formulated it. It was the
problem of a society on the move, loosed from its moorings, moving
through troubled waters to an unknown destination. Liberals and
reactionaries, romantics and classicists, clericals and secularists — the
adversaries clashed in schools and universities, in societies and salons,
in the press and the parliaments. The State had tried to educate for its
own purposes and to form opinion on its own lines. The peoples
of Europe were stirring uneasily under its tutelage, and demanding a
greater control of their own destiny.
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CHAPTER VIII
SOME ASPECTS OF THE ARTS IN EUROPE
A. THE VISUAL ARTS
although this period was one of the most brilliant and pro-
ZA ductive in the history of European art, its achievements do not
1 Vappear as the expression of a single religious or philosophical
principle. No period seems so full of contradictions in its aims, its
personalities and its modes of expression; these contradictions are at
once apparent from a comparison between the work of David and
Prud’hon, Turner and Constable or Delacroix and Ingres. In archi-
tecture a similar gulf appears between the supreme urbanity of Carlton
House or Malmaison and the cyclopean fantasies of Boullee or Ledoux.
Anomalies multiply as the period develops; in ten years Jacques-Louis
David progressed from the role of official painter under the Con-
vention to that of premier peintre de VEmpereur. Ingres, denounced at
first as ‘Gothic’ and as a barbu, came to be regarded as the arch-
priest of academic convention, while the erudite and aristocratic
Delacroix became the pre-eminent exponent of colour, violence and
exoticism.
At the opening of the period these complexities are not fully apparent.
The outstanding artistic event of the last quarter of the eighteenth
century was the appearance of David’s Oath of the Horatii (shown in
Paris, 1785). In this picture the severely monumental style which had
died with Nicholas Poussin was so powerfully revived that it dominated
French art for a whole generation. Its subject — exemplary civic virtue
and disdain of private misfortune — foretells David’s personal role as a
revolutionary. Its grave, simplified manner, its extreme clarity of
space and the calculated grouping of its major figures in superimposed
lateral planes, terminated the rococo taste which had survived three
generations. Only the sensuous group of lamenting women at the
right of the picture recalls David’s youthful contact with Boucher, and
the subdued fire of his coarse-grained execution his lifelong regard for
Rubens.
The significance of the Horatii is not diminished by the fact that
David had his precursors. Theorists such as Winckelmann had already
advocated a return to calm and simplicity, and had set forth principles
of composition similar to David’s. His disciple Raphael Mengs
(1728-79) had tried to interpret these on canvas, though his rather
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pedestrian figure groups merely re-animate forms surviving from Italian
baroque classicism. Diderot had insisted that moral values should pre-
cede sensuous pleasure and praised David’s master Vien for his savante
simplicity and purete ingenue. Such artists and theoreticians had merely
begun a gentle diversion towards neo-classicism; David’s masterpiece
gave the movement sufficient momentum to dominate official taste for
half a century.
Though this achievement alone would rank David as a great master,
it does not explain the esteem of Gericault, nor Delacroix’s descrip-
tion of him, made in i860, as ‘father of the whole modern school of
painting and sculpture’. His full range first appears in the St Roch
begging the Virgin to intercede for the plague-stricken (1780), in which
the dramatic arrangement on opposed diagonals, as well as the fiery
brushwork of the years preceding the Horatii, clearly point to the
influence of Rubens. A further aspect of David’s art appears in the
unflinching presentation of the erupting sores of the plague victims.
Only this merging of scientific realism with baroque principles can
explain Gericault’s regard for David. This realism reaches its zenith in
the Dead Marat of 1793 (Brussels). Meanwhile in his largest State
paintings scenes of current political history appear on an heroic scale
previously reserved for religious and allegorical subjects. These works
are painted with exact documentation which itself reflects a new scientific
outlook and which was introduced by the American painter J. S.
Copley. Among them the Tennis Court Oath, commissioned in 1791
by the Constituent Assembly, for which only an elaborate study was
executed, was the prototype of a succession of Napoleonic and later
state paintings by David and his many disciples.
The period 1795 to 1814 brought no significant innovations in David’s
work; under Directorate and Napoleonic patronage it acquired a certain
grace and delicacy of contour — perhaps the result of a study of Helle-
nistic sculpture— not found in the revolutionary years. As he and his
school absorbed an increasing share of state patronage, he came to
be regarded as the defender of a sterile classicism. This view — still
not quite extinct — can be justly applied to those pupils of David who
reiterated his formal devices and replaced his powerful handling by
flaccid modelling and mechanical contours. On the other hand, the
diversity of power disclosed by David’s more talented pupils is a
reflection of the many-sided character of David’s own gifts, whose
components, isolated and explored by individuals, were to nourish two
(and probably three) distinct lines of development in French painting.
These are still most conveniently defined as ‘classical’, ‘romantic’ and
‘realist’, and their elements — more than one of which may appear in the
work of a single artist — are of paramount importance for the whole of
French nineteenth-century painting.
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Among the major intermediaries between David and the generation
of Delacroix was Antoine-Jean Gros (1771-1835). Though devoted to
the classical principles of his master, he was swept to success as a
painter of Napoleon’s campaigns, beginning in Italy at the age of twenty-
five. His first (and most romantic) portrait of Bonaparte, now at
Versailles, records his crossing of the bridge at Areola. Gros, like his
master, admired Rubens whose turbulent spirit animates the neo-classic
framework of his W'ork. The full importance of Gros’s position in the
transition from Davidian to romantic art can best be seen in his
Napoleon visiting the plague victims at Jaffa (1804; Louvre). Here the
subject is one of the ancillary horrors of war; it also emphasises the
supernatural curative (and self-preservative) powers of the emperor,
who replaces the traditional saint. The Islamic setting moreover fore-
tells the exoticism of the later romantics; and though Gros draws on
Hellenistic and late Michelangelesque forms in some of the figures, a
realism surpassing that of David’s St Roch gives credibility to a super-
naturally heroic theme. This mixing of classical, renaissance, Islamic
and realist elements provides a valuable key to the complexities of the
period.
The battlepieces which brought Gros so many honours cannot now
be discussed, nor the portraits which range from a sensitive and fluent
one of himself at the age of twenty (Toulouse) to that of the ageing
Mme Recamier (c. 1824-5; Zagreb).
While Gros was mainly concerned with the external aspect and the
personalities of Napoleonic history, his fellow-pupil Anne-Louis
Girodet (1757-1824) adapted the forms of neo-classicism to imaginative
and legendary subjects. His Sleep of Endymion (1792; Louvre) demon-
strates the compatibility of classical forms and a romantic mood.
Girodet’ s principal devices — irrational light and shadow, and a precise,
delicate and elongated contour enclosing soft but bloodless modelling —
suggest the contrivances of the theatre. Nevertheless, his Ossian
receiving Napoleon's generals (commissioned in 1801 for Malmaison)
reflects a taste for romantic fantasy shared by Napoleon himself, while
the mood of the Burial of Atala looks forward to the religious revival
of the restoration.
Girodet’s achievements in this field are overshadowed by the work
of a more profound and original artist, Pierre-Paul Prud’hon (1758-
1823) who in the course of his education was to absorb the teaching
of the Church and that of J-J. Rousseau as well. He studied at Dijon
under Devosge, and in 1784 won the prix de Rome, having already
entered on a disastrous marriage. In Italy he studied the paintings of
Leonardo, Raphael, Correggio and Pietro da Cortona, whose Barberini
Palace ceiling he was commissioned to copy. After his return he was
compelled to work at book-illustration, which he did with a charm and
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delicacy foretelling the soft chiaroscuro which was to appear in much of
his painting and evoke comparison with Correggio. David, against
whose triumph Prud’hon (and the ageing Greuze) stood almost alone,
compared him in respectful tolerance to Watteau and Boucher. Though
Prud’hon was always supported by a small but very devoted circle, he
gained little official notice until the turn of the century. By 1796 how-
ever, in the Georges Anthony (Dijon) and Mme Anthony and her Children
(Lyon) he had produced two of the finest portraits of the romantic era,
while his free and lyrical treatment of classical and erotic subjects was
also gaining attention. In 1799 his public career began with a com-
mission to paint a ceiling at St-Cloud, Truth led by Wisdom descending
from the Skies (Louvre). His Italian training gave him the power to
handle great allegories with a universality and conviction hardly
excelled since the sixteenth century, and in these works the charming
decorator appears as a powerful manipulator of figures in action. His
masterpiece is perhaps the Justice and Divine Vengeance pursuing Crime,
completed in 1808 for the Palais de Justice, in which Prud’hon character-
istically adapts the biblical theme of Cain and Abel as a basis for a
secular work, and this, together with the intensely dramatic quality of
his design, raises it far above the empty abstraction of much state
allegorical painting. This work was copied by Gericault, whose
simplification of form by strong light and shade is often foreshadowed
by Prud’hon. A favourite of the Bonaparte family, Prud’hon painted
the portrait of the Empress Josephine (Louvre), and became drawing
master to Marie-Louise, who in 1810 commissioned the Venus and Adonis
(Wallace Collection). These associations may have deprived him of
important religious commissions at the Restoration ; it was however a
religious work, the great Crucifixion of 1822 (Louvre), which closed
his somewhat tragic career.
Theodore Gericault (1791-1824) was one of those artists bom with
an easy command of the innovations of their predecessors. Everything
that the Napoleonic and revolutionary schools could teach, he amplified
with his creative imagination, the power of his hand and his habit of
factual observation. Given a normal lifetime, he would probably have
achieved a synthesis of the heroic mould of David’s neo-classicism, the
passion of romantic art, and the new scientific outlook of realism;
without him these were to pursue for the most part separate courses,
though their meeting-points were often of special significance in
nineteenth-century art. Like his first master Carle Vernet, he was a
devotee of horse-racing and of anglomania. In 1810 he joined the
atelier of Guerin, one of the most academic of David’s pupils; but
among these Gros was clearly his real exemplar. Gericault’s large
Officer of the Guard (Salon of 1812; now Louvre) is close in many ways
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to Gros’s Murat on Horseback, though the twisting movement of
Gericault’s horseman, and the wildness of his mount and of the battle-
field are the result of a more imaginative study of Rubens than Gros ever
made. The Wounded Cuirassier (1814; Louvre) takes a more personal
view of battle; the incident it depicts is passive, while its new mood of
introspection is of the essence of romanticism. In 1816 Gericault went
to Rome, and at a time when most students of antiquity looked at its
vases, cameos and reliefs in linear terms, Gericault studied late antique
horse-tamer groups and casts of the Parthenon friezes as a sculptor in
terms of mass broken by strong shadow. Like Goethe he was fascinated
by the annual race of wild stallions down the Corso, and it is character-
istic that a large series of studies of this scene is the chief memorial of
his stay in Rome. He preferred Michelangelo to Raphael, studying
closely all the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel, and he was impressed (as
was David) by Caravaggio’s naturalism. All these influences, with the
habit of exact documentation, were to play a part in the two years’
work which now led to the Raft of the Medusa, a painting of anonymous
heroism inspired by Gros’s Plague Victims at Jaffa. The subject in-
volved Gericault in precise studies of the dead, the dying and the
insane, all of them landmarks of realist painting. Intended as a protest
against official incompetence following a disaster at sea, it introduces
such romantic attributes as a negro who shares the chance of survival
and — expressive of man’s impotence against nature— the sea itself. The
finished work, a failure at the Salon of 1819, w'as sent on tour to Great
Britain where Gericault followed it in 1820, establishing one of the
Anglo-French artistic links which are of such importance in the first
decades of the century. Here he painted dynamic instantaneous
pictures of racing at Epsom, and made his lithographs and drawings of
life in London, such as the Coal Cart, the Adelphi Vaults and Capital
Punishment.
Of the three years left to him after returning to Paris, the most
impressive works are the portraits of inmates of the Salpetriere, depict-
ing various states of insanity (1821-4). Far from emphasising the horror
of these subjects, his attitude is both scientific and humane. He died
as the result of a jumping accident in 1824, full of ambition and
conscious that his work had hardly begun.
Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) who entered Guerin’s studio in 1816,
became Gericault’s intimate companion and was to some extent his
spiritual heir. With him French romantic painting reaches limits
which it could not have passed without employing symbolism and
abstraction; but of his forty years’ activity only the first ten are within
the scope of this chapter. Delacroix, who came of a high bourgeois
family and was a reputed son of Talleyrand, began his training at a
moment when the order of the First Empire had collapsed and given
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place to a new era of faith and dogma. His complex personality, best
understood from his journals, is easier to comprehend if this ambience
of political reaction — the aftermath of a world convulsion — is remem-
bered. With his classical erudition, he was always to retain a respect
for the order and clarity of French tradition. He was also conversant
not only with Byron, Scott and Goethe, but with Dante, Shakespeare
and Tasso, in all of whose works he was to find subjects.
Delacroix’s first appearance at the Salon was made in 1822 with
Dante and Vergil in the Infernal Regions', its subject, though taking its
origin in medieval Christianity, draws contemporary interest from the
physical and psychological reaction of its human protagonists to the
dark and supernatural scene, and from the unprecedented luminosity of
the colouring. The eclecticism of this picture shows how his powerful
personality was nevertheless guided by familiarity with the masterpieces
collected at the Louvre after the great campaigns. Though the influence
of Rubens is visible throughout the picture, the swimming figures of
the damned are clearly taken from the Last Judgment of Michelangelo.
In his later work Delacroix shows an understanding of Venetian colour-
ing; while among English painters who played an important part in his
artistic make-up, Bonington and Constable are outstanding. The story
of Delacroix’s repainting of parts of his Massacre of Chios (Salon, 1824)
after seeing Constable’s Hay Wain exhibited with a group of the English-
man’s works in that year, is one of the best-known anecdotes of
nineteenth-century painting. This work not only adds to the romantic
iconography of anonymous heroism, but expresses the artist’s personal
sympathy with the aspirations and tragedy of the Greeks. His exotic
portrayal of Turkish riders and their captives derives strongly from
Byron, and here Delacroix first employs small strokes of pure colour —
yellows, pinks and greens — in such a way as to merge at a short distance
into the flesh tints of the living or dying victims. This technique was to
make him memorable to later generations of painters. Delacroix
visited England in 1825, meeting Bonington, Etty, Wilkie and Lawrence.
Both in England and in France he studied medieval and Byzantine
jewelry, bookbindings, mosaics, tombs and armour; such material
appears in the Death of Sardanapalus (1827), which displays animals,
jewels, rich fabrics, slaves, women and violent death; while the Pandects
of Justinian, commissioned in 1826 for the Conseil d’£tat, reveals his
fascination for the last phases of the ancient world. Like Gericault, he
adopted the new medium of lithography; in his nineteen prints of
Faust (1828) the velvety chiaroscuro of the medium is brilliantly
exploited.
At the close of our period, when Delacroix, at thirty-two, was leader
of the French romantic school, academic painting had come to be
dominated by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867). Entering
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the academy of Toulouse at the age of twelve, he there developed an
unshakeable taste for Raphael. He went to Paris in 1796, entering
the atelier of David who, recognising his gift for design, employed him
on his portrait of Mme Recamier. Ingres however became associated
with a group of students led by Maurice Quai and known as barbus
or primitifs, for whose archaising tastes David’s own revolution did not
go far enough. Their inspiration came from descriptive volumes of
antiquities — cameos, vases and reliefs — newly excavated in southern
Europe and engraved in such a way as to emphasise and harden their
linear character. The literary preferences of this group were for
Homer, Ossian and the Bible, and to their influence on the young
Ingres was added that of Flaxman, whose engravings for Homer,
Aeschylus and Dante were well-known in France. This striving after
archaism and abstract purity bears no relation to David’s moralist-
classical purge of rococo forms; Ingres pursued linear purity as such
with fanatical zeal, though in his prix de Rome picture, Achilles receiving
the Ambassadors of Agamemnon (1801), this purity is somewhat muted.
His Jupiter and Thetis, of which the first version probably dates from
1805, though an early work, shows this linear abstraction in a form as
accomplished as it ever reached in a career notable for a kind of pro-
gressive crystallisation. Ingres’s tonal key, like that of several innovators
of this period, is extremely high.
In a group of early portraits, hardly excelled at any later date,
Ingres made brilliant use of the same principles, for instance in three
portraits of members of the Riviere family (1805; Louvre) and in that
of Ingres’s colleague Granet (Aix-en-Provence), painted in Rome in
1807. Notable too were his extraordinarily accomplished portrait
drawings, mainly done during his stay of no less than eighteen years in
Italy. As a southerner he was more at home in Rome than in Paris,
where his work was at first received without enthusiasm. His output of
superb portraits continued during this period, and he produced some
masterly figure paintings, among them the Yalpingon Bather of 1808 and
the Grande Odalisque of 1814 (both in the Louvre). Constant reference
to Raphael and to the monumental art of Italy brought about a weaken-
ing of his mastery of linear design. This departure from his early
archaistic style may explain the popular success of his feebly
Raphaelesque Vow of Louis XIII; he returned in triumph to Paris, was
elected to the Institut and opened an important teaching studio. In this
capacity he came to rank as chef d’ecole of the academic painters and as
a crusader against the example of Delacroix. That Ingres, whose own
departure from the principles of David took a fundamentally romantic
(i.e. primitivist) direction, should find himself leader of the resistance
against romanticism was ironical ; it is possible that with fewer inhibitions
and a humane education his talent might have developed in unsuspected
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directions. But it was to Ingres and his undeviating formal abstraction
that painters returned after the impressionist concern with ocular
sensation in the late 1860’s and i87o’s had surfeited itself.
Though Gainsborough died in 1788 and Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1792,
the English tradition of portraiture, deriving from Titian and Van Dyck
but modified by the naturalism and humanity of the eighteenth century,
seemed unchallenged. Though the first British master of landscape,
Richard Wilson, had died in 1782, and history painting had claimed some
attention from most leading painters, almost every artist of repute in
1790 was first and foremost a portrait painter. William Beechey
(1753-1839), and later John Hoppner (1758-1810), remained close to
the manner of Reynolds. George Romney (1734-98) continued to
paint, while John Opie (1761-1807) and Sir Henry Raeburn (1756-1823),
the former powerful and subdued, the latter brilliantly endowed but
lacking in penetration, were both established. Reynolds’s most gifted
successor, Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830), had made a brilliant
debut at the Royal Academy in 1789 with a full-length portrait of Queen
Charlotte (National Gallery), in which an aristocratic simplicity inherited
from Reynolds is enhanced by a romantic light which, grafted to the
native tradition of portraiture, was to be the key to his extraordinary
success. Lawrence’s full-length portraits of the 1790’s were not excelled
by any later work on this scale, though some later ones reveal astonish-
ing penetration ; for instance the John Julius Anger stein (Royal Academy,
1816). Lawrence’s portraits show how by the end of the eighteenth
century English society, though more anxious than ever to appear in
aristocratic guise, was composed increasingly of the financiers and
professional leaders who frequently sat for him ; conversely, one of his
finest royal portraits (1822; Wallace Collection) shows George IV
himself as a man of affairs, wearing black and pausing to look up from
his papers.
While the painters of London society were acquiring celebrity in a
world where the principles of Newtonian science and mathematics,
now applied to industry and commerce, opened unlimited prospects of
material wealth, the solitary genius of William Blake, poet, engraver,
visionary and thinker, was evolving the challenge to scientific materialism
expressed in his early lyric verses and his later symbolic and prophetic
books. The art of Blake (1757-1827) embodied almost all of the primary
characteristics of romanticism. His Songs of Innocence (1789) and their
illustrations express a deeply felt, naive lyricism, comparable in its
importance to David’s far more spectacular return in 1785 to another
kind of simplicity. It is characteristic that Blake, a working engraver,
should have evolved an experimental technique exactly matching the
spontaneity of his early verse, in the printing of which text and illus-
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tration are merged into an organic whole, as if in protest against the
mechanical constriction of Augustan type-setting and make-up. Blake’s
progressive disillusion with rationalism (even with the rationalist ele-
ment in French revolutionary thought), and his deepening realisation of
the wrongs of suppressing creative energy and the capacities of the senses,
led him to produce an encyclopaedic system of symbolism, peopled by
the personified evils of a materialist world. To give visual expression to
these concepts Blake drew not only on a vivid imagination but on a
varied and unorthodox store of visual material. Gothic tomb-sculpture,
engravings after Michelangelo’s early and late frescoes, certain neo-
classical forms and the contemporary work of Mortimer and Fuseli,
were absorbed and merged. A highly irrational sense of space and scale,
a dramatic chiaroscuro and a system of broken, flame-like colour
mark out Blake’s symbolic illustrations from his early lyrical ones.
These characteristics, emerging in his famous design The Ancient of
Days (1794), are seen even more effectively in Pity (Tate Gallery) and
in the illustrations to the Prophetic Books begun in 1797. Blake had now
perfected a complex technique in which offset printing for large colour
masses is used in conjunction with an impression (often relief-etched)
from a copper plate, with hand-colouring as a final stage. This can be
studied in the terrifying Nebuchadnezzar (1795; Tate Gallery).
After a relatively tranquil period at Felpham in Sussex (1800-3),
Blake returned to London and devoted much of the next seventeen
years to reflection on the subject of man’s redemption and of the
sacrifice of Christ on the Cross; many of his designs now relate to the
Passion, among these being Albion before the crucified Christ and the
Soul embraced by God (c. 1818) illustrating his Jerusalem. In 1821
appeared the seventeen wood-engravings for Vergil’s Eclogues, which
though tiny in scale express an exalted elegiac mood which was to
pervade the work of Blake’s followers Samuel Palmer, Edward Calvert
and George Richmond. Perhaps Blake’s most important late work is
the series of designs for the Book of Job (1823); the disturbed and
poignant series illustrating the Divina Commedia of Dante was un-
finished at his death. As an artist Blake, in spite of Rossetti’s admiration,
was to remain for a century almost unknown.
Though Blake made no impact on the supremacy of the principles of
Sir Joshua Reynolds, another Londoner of no less obscure birth was
shortly to establish within the Royal Academy an art which defied
almost all its canons. Born in 1775, Joseph Mallord William Turner
worked as a topographical artist while studying at the antique school of
the Royal Academy (and from such drawings and prints as he could
borrow). In the mid-i790’s he was employed with Thomas Girtin
(1775-1802) in copying and completing watercolours by J. R. Cozens.
Turner responded powerfully to the scale and nervous imagination
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displayed in these drawings, while Cozens’s methods — elision of the fore-
ground, sweeping atmospheric perspective and exaggerated scale — recur
through all Turner’s work. Already a Royal Academician in 1802, he
did not begin to show his full power as a colourist until his visit to Paris
and the Alps in that year. Intensive study at the Louvre of Italian
masters (above all of Titian) underlies the science which now came to the
aid of his penetrating eye. His originality, unlike Blake’s, did not deprive
him of official success. His claim for English landscape as the equal of
any class of subject in any school was obdurately pressed until his
supremacy was assured, his large Academy pieces being frequently
painted in the mould of some unchallengeable earlier school. Between
1801 and 1805 appeared large sea-pieces emulating — and in some
respects excelling — the styles of Jacob Ruisdael, Backhuysen, Van de
Velde and C-J. Vemet; while about 1815 he embarked on a grandiose
series intended to rival Claude. Meanwhile, he continued to produce
works like the Thames panels (c. 1807; Tate Gallery), indicating more
clearly his private interests — an exquisite balance of hot and cold colour,
and complexities of form and distance within a high, limited tonal key.
Larger pictures in this manner include Somer Hill (1811; National
Gallery of Scotland) and A Frosty Morning (1813; National Gallery).
He continued to publish and by 1 8 14 had arranged for engravings after his
watercolours to be sold by subscription ; thus ensuring the independence
which enabled him later to defy his critics.
In 1819, at the central point of his career. Turner visited Italy. In
Rome and Naples he studied the old masters and antique sculptures as
assiduously as a young student; and Venice, superseding Rome as a
centre for fashionable tourism, became for him a primary source of
material. Many large oils of the 1820’s are of Mediterranean subjects,
though many were less successful than the masterly drawings for
publications such as the Rivers of England (1821-7) and Harbours of
England (1826-8). At the end of the 1820’s important changes occur in
Turner’s style. His true imaginative fire reappears in Ulysses Deriding
Polyphemus (1829; National Gallery); while the brilliant watercolours
made on blue paper at Petworth House ( c . 1830; British Museum)
mark an important simplification and flattening of Turner’s colour-
masses, which helped him to achieve the condensation and grandeur of
alpine and other later watercolours. Turner now ceased to emulate
earlier masters and brought to bear the expressive potentialities of fire,
air and water, atmospheric conditions, rain, clouds, mountains and
waves. Ruskin saw that Turner, by exploiting the anatomy of all
nature, was challenging those who regarded the human body as the
supreme organ of expression in art; and from 1830 to the end of his
career Turner produced the masterpieces which justify this. Among the
finest are FingaVs Cave (1832), The Burning of the Houses of Parliament
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(1835), Slavers (1840), Steamboat off a Harbour's Mouth (1842),
Nor ham Castle ( c . 1840) and the group of seascapes of the 1840’s
(National and Tate Galleries) in which Turner abandons the formal
conventions he had acquired so painstakingly and, using a more
brilliant tonal key than ever, bases his pictorial effects, both static and
violent, entirely on atmospheric and colour perspective. In these
Turner appears as the supreme romantic painter; but they are challenged
by many water-colours — particularly of alpine subjects — in which he
was unhampered by the competitive conditions of the Royal Academy.
Turner died in 1851, having enriched himself and the national col-
lections, with the full support of a generation of academicians brought
up to regard landscape as an inferior branch of painting. John
Constable (1776-1837), who lacked both the virtuosity of Turner and his
skill in worldly affairs, met with a slow response to his less sophisticated
talent. A miller’s son, accustomed to observe the wind and sky, he
attracted the interest of the connoisseur Sir George Beaumont at
an early age, and so came to know works by both Claude and Girtin.
Constable did not study at the Royal Academy Schools until he was
twenty-three; but was soon copying works by Annibale Carracci,
Gaspard Poussin, Jacob Ruysdael and Wilson. At the same time he
was sensibly advised by Benjamin West that Tight and shade never
stand still’; while exact topography and an affection for Gainsborough’s
early woodland subjects laid the foundation of a love for the local and
particular contrasting strongly with Turner’s remoteness and diffusion.
Constable began to exhibit at the Academy in 1802, when he painted
a small view of Dedham which, though based in method on Claude,
already has the immediacy which is the essence of his own charm.
Stoke-by-Nayland (1807; National Gallery) shows this quality too:
it reveals Constable’s pleasure not in a picturesque site but in a familiar
spot suddenly transformed by sunlight. This faculty of transforming the
familiar by dew or sunlight or cloud-shadow was Constable’s peculiar
contribution to romantic art. After 1810 his canvases become more
ambitious in scale and content, perhaps as a result of his study of the
great Chateau de Steen of Rubens, acquired a few years before by Sir
George Beaumont. The influence of Rubens’s technique appears in
Dedham Vale (1811; Elton Hall, Northamptonshire); but it is clear
from Constable’s small oil sketches of this date that he was aiming at a
new immediacy of time as well as of place. The history of his next
fifteen years’ work is that of a struggle to present a particular scene at a
particular moment, on the scale of a six-foot canvas — this scale being
chosen not for its suitability for such a task, but for the sake of estab-
lishing landscape as a reputable medium. Though Turner had achieved
this long before, his carefully chosen types of heroic landscape, in the
mould of earlier masters, were far more acceptable than Constable’s
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raw pastorals, whose vivid sap-green met with the hostility often
reserved for unexpected truths. His ambition was first realised in the
White Horse (1819; Frick Collection, U.S.A.). This was followed by
Stratford Mill (1820) and by the justly famous Hay Wain (1821;
National Gallery) equalled only by The Leaping Horse (Royal Academy,
1825). In these last two works Constable’s extraordinarily difficult
problem was triumphantly solved. Such works cannot be repeated, and
it is remarkable that so many of Constable’s large canvases of the
1820’s are successful; his small sketches, many on paper or card, are
among the most delightful works of the whole century.
The first important German painter of the period, Asmus Jakob
Carstens (1754-98), was bom in Schleswig. After studying at the
Copenhagen Academy and at Liibeck he travelled in 1783 to Italy;
unable to reach Rome, he visited Milan and Mantua, where the
turbulent art of Giulio Romano stirred his proud and somewhat
aggressive spirit. After returning to Berlin and teaching at the Academy
he went in 1792 to Rome, remaining until his death. Though his forms
are in the neo-classic mould, the darkness and melancholy which
pervade his designs, and his tragic personal history, mark him out as a
forerunner of romanticism.
Among his followers, Eberhard Wachter (1762-1862) and Gottlieb
Schick (1776-1812) had, before coming under his influence, absorbed in
France the teaching of David, and their work, particularly the portraits
of Schick, possesses something of French breadth and humanity. Joseph
Anton Koch (1768-1839) though known chiefly as a leading exponent of
landscape in the neo-classic manner, was, after reaching Rome in 1795,
influenced by Carstens, whose work, he claimed, helped him shake off
the inhibitions of his academic training. His landscapes, though treated
with a neo-classical clarity and order, are frequently of alpine and
mountain subjects and often depict the forests, mists and waterfalls
which make up a large part of romantic topography in the early
nineteenth century.
By far the greatest of the German romantic landscape painters was
Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), who, born on the Baltic coast,
studied at the Copenhagen Academy (1794-8) and lived mainly in
Dresden. His exaggeration of scale and distance, which has some
affinity with that of Turner and J. R. Cozens, was heightened by effects
of light and silhouette to create a sense of infinite stillness and vastness;
his figures, always tiny, usually gaze introspectively into the depths of
the picture. Friedrich’s Cathedral in the Mountains (Diisseldorf),
Moon Rising over the Sea (1823; Berlin) and Graveyard under Snow
(1819) exemplify his highly individual manner. Among his followers
should be mentioned Johann Christian Dahl (1788-1857), a Norwegian
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by birth, whose landscapes, loosened and humanised by contact with
Dutch (and possibly English) art are an important contribution to
early plein-air painting. While Dahl’s oil sketches of the Bay of
Naples have affinities with Corot, his studies of cloud formations, like
those of Constable, disclose an interest, shared by Goethe, in the
classification of meteorological phenomena.
The art of Philip Otto Runge (1777-1810), the most ambitious of the
German romantics, is heavily weighted by the elaboration and com-
plexity of his pictorial schemes. Steeped in the mysticism of Jakob
Bohme and in the ideas of Wackenrode, Novalis, Tieck and Holderlin,
his fundamentally neo-classical pictorial method, with its fierce contours
and harsh tonality, was hardly adapted to a pantheistic expression of the
infinite. In his well-known portraits, however, such as that of his parents
and children (1806; Hamburg) his talent as an observer and craftsman
is brought to bear with more success.
The failure of the so-called Nazarenes to achieve more than academic
importance in the history of European art also results from their attempt
to express a sincere and newly-found spirituality in an idiom best
suited to a materialist and documentary presentation of anecdotic
subject-matter.
Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) was born before
David and worked far from the artistic metropolis of his time. In spite
of this he not only belongs unquestionably to the first rank among
painters ; he was at least the equal of David as a moralist; his realism is
equalled only by that of Gericault, while his exploration of the remoter
layers of the imagination has no parallel except in literature until
comparatively recent times. He was born at Fuentetodos in Aragon and
studied in Saragossa and Madrid before visiting Parma and Rome in
1771. Returning to Spain in that year he carried out religious paintings
in oil and fresco, and from 1775 worked for seventeen years for the
royal tapestry workshops, whose director was the German neo-classical
painter Raphael Mengs. In his painted designs for this medium, mostly
of rococo genre subjects, his powers began at length to be revealed,
and in 1778, having access to the royal palace, he discovered the art of
Velazquez, which contributed greatly to the superb directness and
simplicity of his portraits. By 1780 he was one of the king’s painters,
and though in portraiture as in other fields his development was slow,
he now became a wealthy and sought-after member of the Madrid
society which he depicted. Even his royal portraits (Charles II, 1806;
Madrid) could be merciless in their realism ; but all his portraits display
a universality and simplicity reminiscent of the greatest painters of the
Venetian and earlier Spanish schools. In 1793 Goya, after a serious
illness, became deaf; moreover, freed by his wealth from slavery to
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commissions, he began to paint subjects in which, as he said, fantasy and
invention were given play. His palette also began to employ the sombre
greys which distinguish some of his finest work, while in 1799 appeared
the Caprichos, the first of this great series of etchings. In 1808 the
outbreak of war against Napoleon brought a new crisis; the society
which had nourished him collapsed and, once a supporter of French
reformism, he now witnessed the scenes of horror which led to some of
his most terrifying conceptions ( Desastres de la Guerra, 1808-15).
Further illness in 1819 and revulsion at the French re-occupation of
Spain in 1823 heightened the distress of the ageing artist; his nightmare
etchings of the Proverbios ( Disparates ) were executed before 1820.
He now produced some fine and highly unconventional portraits, and
religious paintings such as the Garden of Olives (1819). Some of his
finest genre paintings date from his voluntary exile in Bordeaux, which
lasted from 1824 until his death.
Among the neo-classic sculptors John Flaxman (1755-1826), known
in England for his exquisitely-contoured reliefs and soft modelling,
influenced European art at the turn of the century by his designs
illustrating Dante and Aeschylus. Antonio Canova (1757-1822) made
large figure sculptures of the leaders of Napoleonic Europe in a rigidly
antique mould, but certain funerary monuments and also his maquettes
and drawings reveal a dynamism and drama of baroque derivation.
Bertel Thorwaldsen (1770-1844), like Canova, having reached a cold
perfection and immense fame, failed to achieve lasting influence on
European art. Influenced by early classical Greek rather than Hellenistic
sculpture, his figures none the less betray a rather superficial aspect of
the romanticism of their age.
The comparatively sterile neo-classic phase in European sculpture was
succeeded in France by one of great dramatic force tempered by a new
realism. Indeed, though his output as a sculptor was small, Theodore
Gericault was a founder of this school. Frangois Rude (1784-1855)
executed the splendid relief of the Departure of iyg2 on the Arc de
Triomphe de l’Etoile in Paris, though this and the more profound
Awakening of Napoleon (Fixin, near Dijon) were completed outside the
period of this review. Antoine-Louis Barye (1796-1875) was by 1830
producing his masterly bronze animal groups, and the splendid
caricature models of Daumier date from immediately after 1830.
David d’Angers (1788-1856) and Jean-Jacques Pradier (1790-1852)
were among the most successful romantic sculptors and are attracting
renewed critical attention.
This period is of special importance for the history of architecture,
and marks the beginning of a revolution still far from complete. A
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fundamental break in stylistic continuity was accompanied by a series
of radical changes in the function and scale of buildings and in the
science of building itself, constantly accelerated by the new pressures of
population, commerce, industry and financial credit. The finest build-
ings of the period include Soane’s Bank of England, and in France the
markets and the Bourse.
Most of these manifestations take their origin, not so much in the
rise of the romantic movement, as in the application of scientific
method. The exact documentation of historical styles which led at last
to the collapse of inherited tradition began in the seventeenth century
with the Edifices antiques de Rome (1682) of Desgodetz, whose main
purpose was the correction of inconsistencies in the measurements of
Palladio, Serlio and many others. There followed throughout the
eighteenth century a succession of exact publications, first of Roman
antiquities and later of monuments in Naples, Sicily, Dalmatia, Greece,
Egypt and the Near East. Such works not only lent authority to
departures from the Vitruvian canon; through them architects learned
of the subtle gravity of the Doric order, the astylar masses of Egyptian
architecture, and the spatial (rather than sculptural) architecture of late
antiquity.
In France this revived historical science was matched by an interest
in structural engineering of profound importance for architecture. The
Corps des Fonts et Chaussees, formed at the beginning of the eighteenth
century, and its school, founded in 1750, were increasingly respected by
the architects and theorists who preached a return to structural funda-
mentals. Among these were the Abbe Laugier, whose Essai sur
V architecture (1753) urges the reduction of architectural elements to
those of a primitive hut, and ridicules the use of features whose structural
purpose has been forgotten. The theorists Algarotti and Milizia adopted
a similar rationalism, and several architects adopted these principles,
reinforcing them with a scientific study of structures and materials.
Notable among these were J. R. Perronet (1708-94), head of the Ecole
des Fonts et Chaussees, and J. G. Soufflot (1713-80), architect of what is
now the Pantheon and one of the first students of Gothic structural
techniques. The great theorists of structure, Rondelet (1743-1829)
and Durand (1760-1834), are the heirs of these pioneers.
The Revolution delayed the fruition of this alliance between structural
science and a widened stylistic vocabulary until the turn of the century,
and the first years of the period are remarkable mainly for the designs
of C. L. Ledoux (1736-1806) and E. L. Boullee (1728-99). Ledoux, in
his thirty-five gatehouses built round Paris for the tax-farmers just
before the Revolution, had shown a mastery both of pure form and of the
new vocabulary of neo-classicism. In his plan for a town at the salt-mines
of Arc-et-Senans (Doubs) he combines this with the inherited tradition
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of baroque planning ; certain buildings (perhaps inspired by Laugier)
foretell the blend of cyclopean and geometric solids which appear in
the designs he produced when imprisoned during the Revolution.
Though his work was published in 1804, that of his follower Boullee
was until recently unknown. One of his most remarkable designs is
that of a vast barrel-vaulted and coffered royal library, while his plans
for a museum and amphitheatre foretell the mass scale of nineteenth-
century public architecture. Most are characterised by block-like forms
and exaggerated, unbroken horizontals. Boullee used every device
to enhance the scale of his works, while light and shadow were deliber-
ately employed for emotional effect. None of the vast symbolic designs
of these two architects was executed, but their effect is hinted at by the
colossal astylar mass of the Arc de Triomphe de 1 ’Etoile, begun in 1806
to the design of their contemporary J. F. Chalgrin (1739-1811), one of
the beneficiaries of the cautious patronage of Napoleon I. An admirer
of the Corps des Fonts et Chaussees, Napoleon gave precedence over
works of architecture to a vast programme of public works, roads,
water mains, bridges, quays and markets. The bulk of his patronage
fell at length to a single partnership, that of Pierre-Frangois Leonard
Fontaine (1762-1853) and Charles Percier (1764-1838). Their work at
Malmaison (after 1799), and the designs published by Percier, are a
compendium of the decorative style of the First Empire, with its heavy
rectilinear forms, its malachite and rosewood, and its overlay of
Greco-Roman and Egyptian motifs. Percier and Fontaine showed
their full powers in their share in the completion of the Louvre and in
the highly-wrought Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel; Fontaine, gaining
the patronage of the restored Bourbons, achieved his masterpiece in the
diminutive and wistful Chapelle Expiatoire (1816-21), in the form of a
Greek cross and approached by a raised and cloistered camposanto.
The utilitarian buildings erected under Napoleon gave scope, sur-
prisingly, to the brilliant and versatile Frangois Joseph Belanger
(1745-1818) who in 1779 had designed the miniature palace of
Bagatelle, as well as many later buildings in the style of the Empire.
His cast-iron dome for the Halle aux Bles (1813), now demolished, was
based on a design he had prepared in 1782 — an indication of the swift
assimilation by French architects of current technology. The Bourse
(1826), by Alexandre-Theodore Brongniart, was originally a severe
rectangular block, its giant Corinthian peristyle surmounted by a plain
parapet; its interior was an aisled hall, each bay being covered by a
cupola. The church of the Madeleine, begun in 1764, was redesigned
at Napoleon’s wish by Pierre-Alexandre Vignon as a temple to the
Grande Armee, work being re-started in 1807. This gigantic and
unloved building, with its Corinthian peristyle, top lighting and
hemicycle, was finally consecrated in 1842.
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At the Restoration church-building was resumed without at first
producing any outstanding work apart from the Chapelle Expiatoire
and the scholarly church of Notre Dame de Lorette (1823-36) by
Hippolyte Lebas. The greatest architects of the post-Napoleonic
period, Jacques Hittorff and Henri Labrouste, did not produce import-
ant works before 1830; but Hittorff ’s publications enriched the corpus
of antique architecture. The appearance in 1823 of the first part of the
Edifices de Rome Moderne of P. M. Letarouilly (1795-1855), a pupil
of Percier, marks a revival of interest in the architecture of the High
Renaissance, and adds formidably to the available repertoire of
styles. If, however, the legacy of eighteenth-century science in its
encyclopaedic aspect was to overwhelm the architect with stylistic
alternatives until they became a mere addendum to his structural core,
other branches of applied science developed in the same century were
to make available structural techniques which revealed the falsity of
this additive conception of style.
While French architects derived from the State not only active
patronage but encouragement in keeping abreast of technology and
theory, patronage in England remained largely in the hands of private
landlords and urban speculators. Even the Regent was able to carry
out his ambitious planning schemes only by adopting some of the
devices of the speculators. Technically English architects were out-
classed by English civil engineers ; the most ambitious private building
of the period — the ‘Abbey’ begun in 1795 at Fonthill by James Wyatt
for the millionaire Beckford — collapsed soon after its completion. Two
royal palaces of the period were soon wholly or partly demolished, while
fire destroyed not only the Houses of Parliament, which included much
work of this period, but also the most notable theatres.
While French architectural theory derived much from the experi-
mental attitude of the eighteenth century and from a Rousseauesque
primitivism, English architects owed much to the theorists of the so-
called ‘picturesque’, among them Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale
Price, whose views were first formulated in the 1790’s and given
practical application by Humphrey Repton (1752-1812), a fashion-
able landscape gardener who about 1795 became a partner of the still
unknown architect John Nash (1752-1835). Nash had been trained
under Taylor, and frequently retained Palladian elements in his in-
dividual buildings, but he is much more important for his adaptation of
the visual devices of his partner. Repton favoured elegant informality,
broken skylines, surfaces which broke up the light, and curving paths
promising hidden prospects. Irregular planting ensured that no vista
was ever fully revealed. Nash at first designed cottages and ancillary
buildings to embellish Repton’s schemes, and in this work he drew
freely on whatever style of architecture suited him. Before 1800 he
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began to work for the Prince of Wales and the court, and was thus soon
able to turn his methods to the building of country houses in various
styles — castellated, Tuscan, Italianate, Gothic, Palladian and (in the
case of the enlarged royal pavilion at Brighton) Chinese. Such build-
ings, notable for their charm and as signs of a break in stylistic con-
tinuity, reveal little of the talent for speculative improvisation seen in the
development of Regent’s Park and its magnificent finks with Carlton
House and St James’s. This peculiar talent, in which business acumen
and a gambler’s flair are combined with a sophisticated aesthetic, enabled
Nash to do what has never been done before or since in imposing on
London an urban scheme worth comparing with those of Napoleon I.
This was achieved not only without the massive powers wielded by the
state in France, but in the face of a parliament more jealous than
ever of royal expenditure. The scheme for Regent’s Park, published in
1812, came at a time of rapid metropolitan expansion, and harnessed
the principles of Repton to an elaborate scheme of suburban develop-
ment. Nash’s layout included a great double circus, a royal pavilion
(never built) on the axis of Portland Place, and the magnificent flanking
terraces which survive. Subordinate to these were two ‘picturesque’
villages, a ring road, markets and a canal. While these works continued
into the fifth decade of the century. Parliament in 1813 sanctioned the
building of Regent Street itself, continuing the fine of Portland Place
and curving like one of Repton’s garden paths to join the axis of
Carlton House. This curve, punctuated by Piccadilly and Oxford
Circuses, and at the junction with Portland Place by Nash’s round-
porticoed church of All Souls, marked a victory for picturesque principles
over axial planning in the tradition of Louis XIV. Later additions
included Carlton House Terrace, Trafalgar Square, improvements in
the West Strand area, the Haymarket Theatre, the disastrous first
scheme for Buckingham Palace, and the new British Museum and
National Gallery.
Nash’s extravert manner is in strong contrast to the withdrawn and
sensitive qualities of his contemporary Sir John Soane (1753-1837).
While Nash is remembered particularly for his magnificent stuccoed
facades and perspectives, the name of Soane suggests enclosed space of
labyrinthine subtlety. The son of a Berkshire builder, he was in Italy
from 1778 to 1780 after studying under George Dance the elder, famous
for his Newgate Prison of 1769, and under the fastidious Henry Holland,
who designed Carlton House and Brooks’s Club. Soane visited not only
Rome but Paestum, Sicily and Malta; his admiration for certain
sixteenth-century architects, notably Peruzzi, shows his catholicity. His
career, after a difficult start, was finally launched in 1788 when he was
made surveyor to the Bank of England. Nothing could have better suited
his genius than this building, which by reason of its site could be
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developed only as a series of loosely related halls and courts enclosed by a
blind wall of defensive aspect. His first sketches for the Bank Stock Office
of 1792, done in collaboration with Dance, show how, in their studies
of the palaces, thermae and tombs of antiquity, the most original
architects of the later eighteenth century were concerned with the use
made by the ancients of interior space. The published works of
Piranesi, themselves an illustration of this, must also have played their
part in stirring Soane’s imagination. Soane is distinguished by a severe
modelling of internal space, by his elision of cornices at the springing
of vaults, and by his fastidious moulding of surfaces by grooves and
recessed panels. His mastery of concealed lighting by lanterns and high
lunettes places him among the few romantic architects of high rank.
It is clear however, that his principles derive not only from antiquity
and from English exemplars and that, unlike his contemporaries, he was
inspired by the primitivist theories initiated in France by Abbe Laugier. 1
This primitivism appears in the detailing of the gallery and mausoleum
at Dulwich (1811-14), built aggressively in plain brick. Here the
familiar components of the orders are simplified, displaced, eliminated
or reduced to a rudiment. Such a building, in a style evolved simply
from the demands of construction and function, is highly significant
in an age when style in the accepted sense had become little more than
an outer garment. Soane’s originality can be studied in microcosm in
the private house and museum which he began to build for himself in
Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1812.
If we are content to study English architecture of this period in terms
of its personalities, Nash and Soane are by far the most important.
If the period is considered in terms of neo-classical or Gothic styles it
will be found that almost every leading architect appears in both
sections. Gothic architecture had now developed beyond the rococo of
Strawberry Hill without achieving the scientific ‘correctness’ which
followed the appearance of Rickman’s textbook (1817) and A. C. Pugin’s
Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821-3). Without the charm of
eighteenth-century Gothic, it still lacks the conviction of the work of
Augustus Welby Pugin and William Butterfield. Its best manifesta-
tions are probably the churches of St Mary, Bathwick (Pinch) and
St Luke, Chelsea, a product (by Savage) of the important Church
Building Act of 1818.
The revival of Greek styles found a more fertile soil in Scotland than
in England, and a school founded by A. Elliott, T. Hamilton, designer
of Edinburgh High School, and later W. H. Playfair, sustained its
vigour (especially in Glasgow) to the middle years of the century. In
England its best product was probably St Pancras Church (1818-22)
1 M.-A. L[augier], Essai sur V architecture (Paris, 1753; English translation 1755). The
work was well known to Soane, who possessed five copies at his death.
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by William and Henry William Inwood. Its major practitioners,
William Wilkins (1778-1839) and Robert Smirke (1781-1867), were not
men of genius. Their buildings and those of their more gifted juniors
Charles Robert Cockerell (1788-1863) and Sir Charles Barry (1795-
1860) show characteristics of scale and function easily overlooked if
studied for their style alone. Buildings like Wilkins’s National Gallery
(begun 1833) and Smirke’s General Post Office (1824-9), now de-
molished, though part of a stylistic evolution having roots in eighteenth-
century classical studies, are new in function; equally foreign to the
tradition of the preceding century is the gigantic scale of Smirke’s
British Museum (1823-47). The conjunction of previously unknown
types of building with a mass scale — clubs, banks, museums and,
soon after, industrial and commercial buildings with their attendant
problems, is a characteristic of the new architecture which, far more
than the stylistic dress chosen by the architect, gives it the authentic
stamp of the nineteenth century. In France the technical training of
architects enabled them in the first half of the century to deal effectively
with these new problems by the use of new structural materials and the
techniques appropriate to them. In England, where the training of
architects paid little regard to the new technology, purely structural
problems fell increasingly into the hands of engineers, some of whose
works are recognised as among the finest monuments of the period.
B. MUSIC
Between the years 1790 and 1830 the art of music experienced a signi-
ficant shift of emphasis from the disciplined forms of the Age of Reason
to patterns of considerably greater freedom and individuality, even
eccentricity. The limited scope of carefully controlled early symphonies
gave way, by stages, to the seductive call of Romanticism. The develop-
ment was stimulated by the social emancipation of the composer, whose
status advanced from that of household retainer to independent artist.
The musician of 1 790 was still principally an artisan. Prince Esterhazy,
often graciously described as Haydn’s patron, was in reality his
employer. Like the pastry cook whose products must satisfy the
princely palate, Haydn had his duties as a member of the domestic
staff, including the composition of suitable music for various functions.
Mozart, in his rebellion against this sort of relationship, and his
determination to be his own master, brought upon himself poverty,
overwork, and ultimately an early death. A few years later Beethoven
could support himself without any permanent attachment. This was
partly due to the growing interest of the bourgeoisie, for their active
support not only augmented the income from public concerts but also
increased the demand for printed music and so helped to establish the
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artist’s independent rank. At the same time, respect for the musician’s
role in society had reached a stage where the Viennese nobles now
tolerated Beethoven’s forthright behaviour which, at times, could only
be described as boorish. The acceptance of the artist on his own terms
was accompanied by a growing self-consciousness on the part of
composers concerning their art and, as a result, many felt inclined to air
their views on music and aesthetics. Schumann, Berlioz and Wagner
have each left behind extensive critical writings which are still being read
for their intrinsic interest. Their journalistic approach was in direct
contrast to earlier writings by composers whose intention was purely
pedagogical. By 1830 the Romantic philosophy of music was firmly in
command.
The rise of the public concert in England and France has been
sketched in earlier volumes of this history. 1 In the period here under
discussion certain tendencies became more pronounced, and two of
these were of prime significance. There was an inclination to get away
from seasonal restrictions, such as favouring the Lenten season for
concerts because then the opera houses were closed; and there developed
a demand for more permanent auditoriums that would be serviceable
throughout the year, in place of the coffee houses and public gardens
where outdoor concerts were frequently held. The following fist of
concert societies founded in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries names those that had some importance in the history of music.
1771
Vienna
Tonkunstler-Societat
1776
London
Concerts of Ancient Music
1781
Leipzig
Gewandhaus-Konzerte
1791
Berlin
Singakademie
1812
Vienna
Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde
1813
London
Royal Philharmonic Society
1826
Berlin
Philharmonische Gesellschaft
1828
Paris
Societe des Concerts du Conservatoire
With the exception of the London Concerts (1776-1848) and the
Vienna Societat (1771-1871) these institutions are still in existence today.
The leadership of the German-speaking countries in instrumental music
in the nineteenth century is indicated by the prominence of Vienna,
Berlin and Leipzig, whereas the lack of Italian cities reflects the domina-
tion of opera in the musical life of that country. An attitude of historic-
ism is noticeable in the aims of several of the societies. The most
noteworthy event in the existence of the Berlin Singakademie was the
1 Volume VI, Chapter IV, description of the Whitefriars Concerts (founded 1672) and
the Concert Spirituel (founded 1725), with bibliographical references concerning public
concerts from the eighteenth century to the present. Volume VIII, Chapter IV, contains a
discussion of the Lenten concerts offered by Handel in the early part of the eighteenth
century and by Mozart in the second half.
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revival of Bach’s St Matthew Passion under Mendelssohn in 1829. The
Concerts du Conservatoire under Habeneck were probably more
important than any other in establishing the French and thereby the
European position of Beethoven thirty years after he had settled in
Vienna. Moreover, the London Concerts of Ancient Music stipulated
that works to be performed must be at least twenty years old. Printed
concert programmes were not in general use before 1800, though
Reichardt had introduced them in Berlin in 1784. The modem solo
recital became a popular form of entertainment after 1830, largely
owing to the virtuosity and international acclaim of Paganini and Liszt.
The turning-point in Haydn’s life came toward the end of 1790 with
the death of Prince Nicholas Esterhazy. While his years of service with
the Esterhazy family were scarcely a drudgery, Haydn’s position there
as a hired hand contradicted the respect and renown he commanded in
the world outside. Now the accession of Prince Anton, who was with-
out his father’s musical interests, gave Haydn (while nominally retaining
his post as Kapellmeister) a new freedom, of which he took full advant-
age. In December 1790 he agreed to a proposal of Johann Peter
Salomon, the London violinist and impresario, that he visit England
(Vol. VIII, Chapter IV). To this visit of 1791-2 and the second which
followed in 1794-5 we owe Haydn’s last twelve symphonies and, less
directly, the two great choral works, The Creation and The Seasons.
The symphonies were intended for public performance in London and,
with the single exception of No. 99, which was written in Vienna
between his two visits, all were actually composed in England. It is
clear, moreover, that in composing these symphonies Haydn attempted
to suit the musical taste of London whose resources as a metropolitan
centre dwarfed the orchestral facilities of Vienna and the Esterhazy
court. Concerning symphony No. 91, composed in 1788, he remarked
in a letter to a friend that ‘a great deal must be altered to suit the
English taste’. This necessity to please a public that might easily become
bored by an unchanging routine, one whose entertainment had included
the latest instrumental effects and innovations, probably accounts for
the brilliance and variety of the London symphonies. The now famous
nicknamed movements such as the ‘Clock’ from No. 101, the ‘Surprise’
from No. 94, the ‘Military’ from No. 100, were obviously intended as
novelties for a large audience. A similar endeavour to gratify his
audience may be discerned behind the choice of melodies. They are
truly popular without being cheap. This character of the tunes,
reminiscent of folk-song and dance, made Haydn the most popular
instrumental composer of the early nineteenth century, a century that
was dominated by the taste of large audiences rather than connoisseurs.
The brilliance of these works was by no means superficial. In his
sixties Haydn had not lost the vigour and inventiveness which he dis-
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played in his Esterhazy works some twenty years earlier. An engaging
freshness is ever present; but the quality of the London symphonies
could not have been achieved without the maturity that decades of
experience had yielded. They were, in fact, the culmination of the genre
in the eighteenth century both in construction and in sonority. The
slow introduction to the first movement, with which the young Haydn
had occasionally experimented, had now become a regular feature.
Thus a salient characteristic of Lully’s French Overture of the old
regime was preserved ; it is a frequent ingredient of the symphonic works
of the nineteenth century from Beethoven to Cesar Franck. Unlike
Lully, the old Haydn and his successors frequently integrated the intro-
duction by means of some thematic procedure with the body of the
movement.
In constructing the main body of his first movements Haydn eventu-
ally decided upon the type of sonata form that had been favoured by
Christian Bach 1 and Mozart, in which a graceful cantabile melody
functioned as the ‘second’ theme, thus providing a clearly discernible
contrast to the more vigorous and masculine opening theme. In Haydn’s
earlier works this contrast was often merely one of key, the second
theme being a modified transposition of the first. But in the London
symphonies the duality of key is supplemented by a duality of melody,
and melodies, since time immemorial, are readily recognised and
remembered. Haydn’s decision to use contrasting themes gave his
works a plastic clarity which served to increase their popularity more than
ever. It was through Haydn’s influence that Mozart’s model became the
standard form, the one which Beethoven followed in all of his nine
symphonies. Haydn’s willingness to learn from the short-lived Mozart
is also shown in his orchestral scoring. The inclusion of clarinets in the
symphony orchestra, long practised in Paris, was not an international
vogue. Mozart yielded to the sonorous potentialities of this instru-
ment in his last works, and the successful results of the innovation un-
doubtedly tempted Haydn. In consequence, the clarinet plays an in-
creasingly important role in the instrumentation of the London
symphonies. But Haydn did not merely copy; the spaciousness of his
scoring and patterning reveals that the larger orchestra at his disposal
inspired him not only to larger but also to greater music.
If London proved to be the culmination of Haydn’s symphonic
career, the effects of these visits endured long after he returned to Vienna.
Among his varied experiences the English national anthem, God save
the King, with its simple dignity had made a great impression. As
a result, he was moved to write for Austria what is probably his most
widely known composition, the ‘Emperor’s Hymn’, Gott erhalte
1 Sebastian Bach’s youngest son, born 1735, the ‘London’ Bach who, jointly with Abel,
conducted London’s fashionable Bach-Abel concerts from 1765 until 1782.
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Franz den Kaiser! But most of all, Haydn gained in England a true
enthusiasm for Handel’s music, particularly for the oratorios.
Baron van Swieten (Vol. VIH, Chapter IV) had come to know some
of these oratorios during his service as Ambassador in Berlin (he was
responsible to Kaunitz for negotiations with Frederick the Great con-
cerning the Polish partition). On his return to Vienna in 1777 he
endeavoured to promote a wider knowledge of Handel’s music by
organising performances of the oratorios, for some of which Mozart
wrote additional orchestral parts. Haydn undoubtedly heard some of
these performances. When, therefore, he discovered in England a
popular tradition and widespread enthusiasm for Handel’s works his
imagination took fire and induced him to create works of his own in this
style.
The libretto of The Creation, which is traditionally supposed to have
been written for Handel (who either rejected it or died before he could
compose it) was taken back from London by Haydn. Its author is not
known for certain, and the supposition that it was written by Thomas
Linley must remain suspect. A more likely candidate would seem to be
Newburgh Hamilton who had written the texts for Handel’s Samson
and Alexander’s Feast. Returned to Vienna, Haydn set to music a
German version, written by van Swieten, who also made suggestions
for some of the purely musical effects.
Van Swieten’s taste for pictorial imagery was largely responsible for
the naive musical descriptions which lend The Creation so much charm,
for Haydn’s imaginative treatment of the libretto gave to the music a
spontaneous freshness. The opening of the oratorio, the ‘ Representation
of Chaos’, is a sustained portrayal, not of the turmoil which the title
suggests, but of a dark and empty void. The pictures throughout the
work are drawn with simplicity and effectiveness, nowhere more so
than in the sudden brightness of C major on ‘Light’, in the opening
narrative.
Van Swieten also wrote the libretto for The Seasons, which he
adapted from James Thomson’s popular poem. A general interest in
English literature at this time was having its effect on writers of the
Romantic period in Germany and accounts for the English pedigree of
Haydn’s two oratorio libretti. Van Swieten played an even greater role
in The Seasons than in The Creation. His manuscript copy contains
abundant suggestions for musical ideas, most of which Haydn was
prepared to adopt. It was a fortunate circumstance that this patron of
the arts had keen musical sensibilities, as the quality of many of these
marginal notes reveals. 1 The Seasons makes little pretence at being
dramatic; it is a series of tableaux of village life, rather in the manner
1 Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, vol. 89 (London, 1962-63), pp. 63-74,
particularly p. 71.
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of a Brueghel painting. Whether he depicts a hunting scene or a con-
vivial evening around the fire, Haydn imbues them with a colour and
vividness one would scarcely expect of an old man.
As far as public performances go, The Creation and The Seasons
are the most important compositions of the last decade of Haydn’s life,
though this is not to deny the artistic perfection of the last masses and
string quartets. The popularity of Haydn’s two oratorios and the con-
tinuing enthusiasm for Handel’s works were supplemented in the early
nineteenth century by a revival of Sebastian Bach’s Passions. Together,
the choral works of these three composers constituted a vigorous induce-
ment throughout England and Europe for the foundation of oratorio
and choral societies. At a time when an enjoyment of the arts tended
to become increasingly passive, these organisations played the import-
ant role of offering an opportunity for active participation, a function
that is even truer today than it was in the early nineteenth century.
The presence of Haydn in Vienna undoubtedly impelled Ludwig van
Beethoven to move there. His intention was to study with the great
composer. Beethoven was born in Bonn in 1770 but lived in Vienna con-
tinuously from 1792 until his death in 1827 (Vol. VIII, Chapter IV).
For this reason he is generally thought of as a Viennese composer.
The lessons with Haydn were not a great success and ceased altogether
when Haydn left for London in 1794; nevertheless, there was much to
occupy the young Beethoven in the Austrian capital.
Contemporary Vienna was a musical city that enjoyed the patronage
of music-loving nobles, among them the Princes Lobkowitz, Lich-
nowsky and Kinsky and Baron van Swieten. In 1803 the Archduke
Rudolph, son of Emperor Leopold II, became a pupil of Beethoven
and also took his place with the others as patron. In Beethoven’s case
the financial support of the aristocracy was a substantial addition to the
income he received from concerts and publications. In 1808 Jerome
Bonaparte, as King of Westphalia, offered Beethoven a court appoint-
ment at Kassel. But his presence in Vienna was so valued that a con-
sortium of nobles, headed by the Archduke, offered Beethoven an
annual income of 4000 florins (Gulden). Here was a striking instance of
support for an independent artist who was under no obligation as a
private employee. 1 The homes of the aristocracy gladly admitted
promising young musicians, and we read of Beethoven playing fugues
from the Wohltemperiertes Klavier at the home of van Swieten. This is
an instance, too, among many, of the reviving interest in J. S. Bach’s
music. Beethoven’s skill as a performer opened many doors, and his
improvisations became renowned. It was inevitable that his earliest
1 The devaluation of the Gulden in the Finanz-Patent of 1811 (p. 402) was a matter of
much chagrin to Beethoven. Cf. E. Anderson, ed.. Letters of Beethoven , 3 vols. (London,
1961), vol. 1, p. xlviii.
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compositions should reflect the style of his two great predecessors, Haydn
and Mozart. Yet his reputation as a composer grew and by 1800 he
had written several piano sonatas, the first two concertos for piano, the
six string quartets (Opus 18) and the first symphony, this last work
appropriately dedicated to van Swieten. In 1804 the full size and nature
of Beethoven’s genius came to flower in the Eroica symphony.
On its completion Beethoven wrote to Breitkopf and Haertel in
Leipzig offering the publishers a ‘Grand new symphony’ which was
‘really entitled Bonaparte’. Louis XIV of France and Charles II of
England could boast that their patronages were of direct consequence
for some of the greatest works of music commissioned in their time. But
Napoleon was never prominent as a patron of music. In the intellectual
currents of the early 1800’s he became a convenient symbol of the dis-
satisfaction with absolutism. And the disillusionment experienced later
by his republican admirers can hardly have a better illustration in the
history of music than the change in the dedication of Beethoven’s
Eroica symphony: the version finally published in Vienna in 1806
forbears to mention the name of Napoleon Bonaparte and instead
‘ celebrates the memory of a great man ’. The symphony is then dedicated
to one of the Viennese nobles. Prince Lobkowitz.
This symphony in E flat begins a new era in the music of Beethoven
and, indeed, in the history of the symphony as a whole. Its length alone
was enough to arouse comment, and was no doubt one of the reasons
why Breitkopf and Haertel refused to publish the work. This is under-
standable, for the magnitude of the symphony exceeds any composed
by Haydn or Mozart. The first movement is, of itself, a huge and
complex structure. Its themes are remarkable, not for their intrinsic
melodic aptness but for their suitability for development. The opening
notes generate one of the composer’s most tautly constructed move-
ments, where the introduction of a new melody in the development
section is actually part of the organic growth of the movement and not a
mere episodic digression. The coda, too, assumes greater significance
in this work. What had been merely a consolidation of the final cadence
in the early symphony now became a second development section, with
further expansion and evolution before the music finally settles down to
its home key. The remaining movements, too, have strength and origin-
ality : the funeral march as a slow movement, the scherzo-and-trio with its
romantic horn calls, and the variations of the last movement. These
variations, based on a simple theme and its equally simple counter-
point from Beethoven’s own ballet, Prometheus, might easily degenerate
into triviality but for the skilful workmanship to which the material is
subjected.
The propulsive force and rhythmic drive that characterise the Eroica
distinguish most of Beethoven’s work. The impetus is still more strongly
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felt in the fifth symphony, completed in 1808. To maintain that the
whole of the first movement is evolved from the first four notes would
be an overstatement; nevertheless it is true that the rhythm of the
opening bars permeates the movement and, moreover, is perceived
throughout the symphony. The first movement exemplifies Beethoven’s
capacity for concentration of his thematic material. The second subject
grows out of a variant of the opening bars, and this variant is developed
to an ultimate degree during the course of the movement. It was usual
for Beethoven to reduce his material to its basic elements, and in the
development section of this movement he takes the practice to its limit.
By reducing the motive note by note there remains finally a single note
which, because of its preparation, still retains a thematic significance.
The more lyrical tone of the slow movement is succeeded by the sombre
scherzo which leads without a break into the last movement. The
passage which connects these last two movements is one of the most
dramatically striking portions to appear in any of Beethoven’s works;
it was inserted by him at a relatively late stage in composition. The
growing tension in fifty bars of music, pianissimo almost throughout
and supported by an inexorable drumbeat, becomes well-nigh unbear-
able when it is suddenly released into the triumphant C major of the
finale.
In Beethoven’s fifth and seventh symphonies the primary importance
of rhythm is again clearly manifest. In fact, the almost demoniacal
impetus of the seventh caused some contemporary critics to question
the composer’s sanity. Tovey suggests that many of Beethoven’s themes
are recognisable from their rhythmic shape alone. An extreme degree of
rhythmic domination is to be found in the string quartet Opus 59 No. 1
(the first quartet dedicated to Count Razumovsky) where the second
movement begins with a measured throbbing on one note. It is this
rhythmic, rather than a lyrical, foundation that gives Beethoven’s
music its momentum and its directness of expression even to the least
sophisticated listener. The finale of the fifth symphony has none
of the melodic beauty of Mozart or Schubert; it has no subtlety of
harmony or delicacy in scoring. But it has simplicity of expression with
strong rhythmic impulses to make an immediate appeal to any
audience.
The ninth symphony has been the subject of controversy since its
first performance in 1824. The mysterious opening clearly heralds a
work of spacious proportions and, indeed, the symphony’s length of
over an hour (almost twice as long as any Haydn symphony) caused
some bewilderment among Beethoven’s contemporaries. The dynamic
quality of the first main theme sets the tone for two movements; the
opening allegro is succeeded by a scherzo (instead of the customary
slow movement), so that, except for some momentary bucolic relaxation
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in its trio-section, the tension is maintained until the adagio of the third
movement. This beautiful slow movement (a free variation on two
themes) is in itself a contradiction of the popular myth that Beethoven
had lost interest in the sheer beauty of sound because of the deafness
which had afflicted him since his late twenties and was now complete.
While the greatness of the first three movements of the ninth symphony
is scarcely disputed, the choral finale even now remains open to dis-
cussion. Does it represent the peak of Beethoven’s achievement in the
symphonic form or must it be put down as a magnificent failure?
Certainly, the demands made on the human voice are difficult of fulfil-
ment, even for professional choirs; and the main melody, when com-
pared with the finale of the first symphony by Brahms, which is derived
from it, is lacking both in sophistication and harmonic interest. It is
known that for some time Beethoven had entertained the thought of
composing a setting for Schiller’s ‘ Ode an die Freude ’ (Ode to Joy).
After much deliberation he decided to incorporate the poem into the
ninth symphony in place of a purely instrumental finale. An extended
orchestral opening precedes the choral singing. The material of the
previous three movements is explored as if in search of an appropriate
melody to accompany the chorus. Each attempt is rejected by the
cellos and basses in a recitative as eloquent as though it were said in
words. Finally, the ‘joy’ melody is enthusiastically accepted, and the
movement may proceed. Even so, there are three orchestral variations
of the theme, followed by the furious pandemonium with which the
movement opened, which the chorus interrupts, ‘O Freunde, nicht diese
Tone! sondern lasst uns angenehmere anstimmen, und freudenvollere.’
(‘O friends, not these sounds! but let us give tongue to others, more
pleasing and joyful.’)
Of the many comments this movement provoked (as well as the tune
on which it is built) we may quote two by Wagner since they reveal so
clearly the double edge of Beethoven’s style. Wagner observed that
‘the musician felt the necessity to throw himself into the arms of the
poet to bring about the creation of the true, unfailingly effective and
redeeming melody’; and at another time, ‘the most elevated art has
never produced anything artistically more simple than this tune whose
childlike simplicity induces in us a sacred awe. The tune becomes, in the
course of composition, the cantus firmus, the chorale of a new con-
gregation, around which — like a sacred chorale of Sebastian Bach —
the additional voices group themselves in a contrapuntal manner ’. 1
It is true that the tune in its uttermost simplicity represents the universal
melody for which Rousseau had clamoured and which Haydn at times
achieved. This universality of musical language, equally intelligible
among nations, as well as among various layers of society, contradicts
1 Gesammelte Schriften, 9 vols. (Leipzig, 1871-83), vol. ni, p. 385; vol. K, p. 123.
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the facile generalisation that the music of the late Beethoven was
thoroughly Romantic. On the other hand, Wagner’s idea of a newly-
emerged congregation listening to this quasi-chorale in ‘sacred awe’
sets forth an attitude that was very marked in composers of Romantic
music. It was, in fact, anticipated in Beethoven to some extent: that is
to say, the notion of a composer who no longer aims to amuse or even to
enlighten his audience, but one who sees in himself a high-priest of
society, who looks upon his audience as a congregation, and his music
as part of a ritual. In Beethoven we have a fusion of the rationality
of the Enlightenment and the conceits of Romanticism to an even greater
degree than in either Mozart or Haydn.
The words of the finale of the Ninth Symphony proclaim the idealism
of their time, the brotherhood of mankind: ‘all men are becoming
brothers’. This Utopian dream served the cult of the freemasons well
and brought into their ranks such eminent persons as Haydn and
Mozart, Wieland and Goethe. So perfectly did Beethoven’s finale
apprehend the current mood that the melody became widely known
through its appearance in masonic song-books.
Schiller’s ‘ Ode an die Freude' was but one instance of Beethoven’s
devotion to this poet’s ideals. As a historian Schiller had written on the
early struggle of the Netherlands to free themselves from Spanish rule.
This subject came to symbolise early nineteenth-century aspirations
toward political freedom. In consequence, a great impact was made on
contemporary Germany through Goethe’s tragedy Egmont, for which
Beethoven wrote incidental music. Though temperamentally not
compatible, these two men each had a perspicacious sense of the other’s
greatness. Few original documents exist concerning their actual inter-
course, and they speak for themselves. In April, 1811, Beethoven
entrusted the amateur musician, von Oliva, with a letter to Goethe:
Shortly you will receive the music for Egmont from Leipzig . . . this wonderful
Egmont which I have thought, felt and expressed in music as warmly as I have read it.
I wish very much to know your judgment of it, even adverse criticism will benefit
me and my art.
The letter as a whole is full of humility. Goethe’s reply was cordial; he
planned to perform the music in the Weimar theatre and he felt certain
of the great delight such a performance would offer both to himself and
to Beethoven’s many admirers in the region. Considering his usually
guarded mode of expression, the terms in which Goethe expressed his
judgment of the Egmont score were forceful and unusually plain-spoken:
The vision [of Klaerchen] disappears when the drums of the guards are sounded to
accompany Egmont to his death. This is indeed an occasion that calls for music,
and Beethoven has followed my intentions with miraculous genius (bewundems-
wertes Genie).
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Another comment states:
The compositions of songs frequently furnish only a quid pro quo : rarely does the
poet feel [that all he has offered has really] penetrated, and usually we learn only
about the art and temperament of the composer .... Here Beethoven has done
miracles.
Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio, is similar to Egmont in theme though
different in time and setting. The search for a libretto persisted for
years, for Beethoven looked upon his mission with magisterial serious-
ness, and he would not consider a trivial subject. The story of Leonora’s
enduring love for Florestan in the face of extreme danger finally met his
exacting demands, and, after many vicissitudes, Fidelio took the form
in which we know it today. Though unique among Beethoven’s works,
the opera shares many characteristics with contemporary French operas
and, in fact, can be properly understood only in the context of French
operatic history in the age of Napoleon.
With the exception of Mozart’s Entfiihrung aus dem Serail and Die
Zauberflote there were few German works of significant artistic stature.
Gluck’s prolonged activity as a composer of Italian opera is apt to
obscure the fact that in the last years of his active life he was, to all
intents, a French composer. Gluck’s spirit lived on in French music
long after his death. The French versions of Orfeo and Alceste and the
two Iphigenia operas had captured the French stage, with the result that
Gluck held a position in France similar to that of Handel in England.
The effect was that a Gluckian style dominated French opera. At the
same time, the social and political upheaval of the Revolution had a
profound effect on France’s musical life. The uncertainties of everyday
existence were reflected in a heightening of dramatic exigencies and in
the popularity of the ‘rescue opera’ of which Gretry’s Richard Coeur
de Lion of 1784 was a prototype. Horror scenes in which dungeons and
graves played a prominent part, with the rescue of hero or heroine in
the nick of time, became the accepted dramatic formula. The more
popular of these works, Lodoisca (1791), Elisa (1794), Medee (1797)
and Les Deux Journees (1800) could boast international success. They
were composed by the Florentine Cherubini who followed in the foot-
steps of Lully and Gluck in becoming France’s leading musician despite
his foreign birth. More important, perhaps, he achieved eminence not-
withstanding his failure to win the favour of Napoleon, and he con-
solidated his national and international reputation as director of the
Paris Conservatoire from 1822 to 1842. As in the case of his dis-
tinguished predecessors, Cherubini’s method of composition also
differed from that of the conventional Italian opera composer in that
he extended the role of both orchestra and chorus (Vol. VI, Chapter
IV). The effect of the Revolution in focusing attention on the masses
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was evident in the common sight of crowds taking part in Republican
hymns, written for special events. Occasional commissions of this sort
from the revolutionary authorities provided Cherubini with an
opportunity to develop his own choral and orchestral style. With their
broad intelligibility and musical scores for large resources, such works
have been described as l al fresco'. During his residence in Vienna
(1805-6) Cherubini supervised the performance of some of his rescue
operas and thereby gained the esteem of both Haydn and Beethoven.
It is obvious, furthermore, that the topical subject matter of these
operas and Cherubini’s musical treatment of them were of cardinal
importance for Beethoven’s Fidelio.
The ‘al fresco' technique was to become increasingly important in a
century that experienced the construction of large opera houses and
concert halls. The works of Cherubini and his rival Spontini ( La Vestale,
1807; Fernand Cortez, 1809) may be regarded as the ancestors of the
grand opera of Meyerbeer and early Wagner as well as the compositions
of Berlioz which demanded such extraordinarily large performing
forces.
Among the currently popular operas Beethoven felt that Cherubini’s
Deux Journees and Spontini’s Vestale had the best libretti. It is not
surprising, therefore, that Fidelio is derived from a French libretto,
namely a German version of Leonore, ou I’amour conjugal by Jean
Nicolas Bouilly, the author of Les Deux Journees. Thus, for subject
matter Fidelio belongs to the genre of post-revolutionary French opera,
with its rescue, dungeon-scene, grave-digging, and sermons on political
freedom.
Despite Beethoven’s impelling desire to write an opera, he lacked the
instinctive sense of the theatre which Mozart possessed. The first
version was withdrawn after three performances in 1805, and the
second, which was carefully pruned, including the reorganisation of the
material into two acts instead of three, failed again a year later. In 1814
the work was once more revised, the libretto rewritten by G. F.
Treitschke, a man of wide experience in adapting French rescue
operas to Viennese taste (including the aforementioned Medee and Les
Deux Journees). Only, then, nine years after its initial appearance, did
Fidelio meet with success. The early failures may be attributed in part
to the fact that performances took place during the difficult times of the
French occupation of Vienna, but it is certainly true that some revision
was necessary in order to make the work effective.
In its final form Fidelio has successfully held the operatic stage for a
century and a half. Nevertheless, as the work of one whose claim to
immortality rests on the creation of absolute music, Fidelio has been
widely criticised for its profusion of symphonic elements at the expense
of dramatic integrity. The famous canonic quartet in Act I is usually
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cited to support this criticism although, when taken on its own terms,
the quartet is appropriate in the context. But, paradoxically enough, by
employing for his dramatic expression the forms mainly associated with
absolute music (such as canon and sonata form) and by integrating
these forms into the framework of the opera as a whole, Beethoven
anticipated the future course of music. For in the Romantic and
neo-Romantic works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the
amalgamation of dramatic and programmatic intentions with the
formal patterns of instrumental music is a conspicuous feature. The
passage in the second act of Fidelio where speaking voice and orchestra
are combined is particularly poignant. It derives from Rousseau and
Mozart (Vol. VIII, Chapter IV) and points the way to Weber and
Wagner.
In spite of its ultimate success Fidelio never challenged the supremacy
of Italian and French opera in Vienna. Italy’s most successful repre-
sentative in the early nineteenth century was Rossini (1792-1868).
The success of Tancredi (Venice, 1813) placed its composer in the leader-
ship of Italian opera all over Europe. Tancredi was followed by the
Barbiere di Siviglia (Rome, 1816), and from 1815 to 1823 Rossini was
under contract to write two operas yearly for La Scala at Milan and for
the Italian Opera at Vienna. When he arrived in that city in 1822 his
popularity approached a veritable craze. He met both Beethoven and
Schubert and was complimented by Beethoven on his ‘excellent opera’
(// Barbiere). No professional musician could deny Rossini’s obvious
assets; his infectious melodies, his thorough grasp of the operatic
metier and its potentialities, and his sense of humour, so indispensable
for the success of an opera buffa. At the invitation of the manager of the
King’s Theatre Rossini arrived in London in 1823, met with flattering
attention from the court, and found himself in possession of £7000 when
he left England five months later. He then settled in Paris as manager
of the Theatre Italien and was appointed premier compositeur du Roi in
1826. His last memorable success was Guillaume Tell (Paris, 1829),
in which he successfully transferred the qualities of the French revolu-
tionary opera to a remote age and, at the same time, infused it with the
vitality of his own Italianate melodies. Then, at the early age of thirty-
seven, Rossini went into virtually complete retirement, for reasons
which have never been satisfactorily explained. That his action was not
due to the falling off of his musical powers is proved by the few works
which appeared later, such as the Stabat Mater of 1 842 and the Petite
Messe Solennelle of 1863, the latter strangely prophetic of Verdi’s
Requiem.
That the robust appeal of Rossini’s music would overshadow Beet-
hoven’s popularity is understandable enough in terms of a general
public. But it is more difficult to explain why German opera, in spite
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of courtly and municipal patronage, evolved so slowly from its infancy
compared with the operatic developments in Italy and France. The
efforts of Emperor Joseph II to establish a national tradition in Vienna
failed in spite of Mozart’s Entfuhrung aus dem Serail ; and it must be
admitted moreover that both the later Zauberflote and Fidelio occupy
their positions in the history of German opera as individual master-
pieces rather than as currents in the main stream of operatic develop-
ment. The incentive for a national development was eventually supplied
by Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischutz. This opera was first per-
formed in the Berlin Schauspielhaus in 1821. (The Lindenhaus, where
opera was usually performed, was occupied at the time by an Italian
troupe under the management of Spontini, a composer favoured by
Napoleon and the Prussian King Frederick William III.)
It was not only Weber’s preference for folklore traditions and
superstitions that assured the success of the Freischutz , for German
operas on romantic subjects had been appearing with increasing fre-
quency. But Weber’s bold imagination, coupled with superior technical
musical equipment to carry out his ideas, captured the public’s attention
in the same way as the German literary writers had for some years past.
Der Freischutz contains all the ingredients of a successful romantic
opera: it is concerned with village characters rather than historical or
mythological figures; it has a pure heroine who confronts a hero who is
human in his weaknesses; the villain is thoroughly black. There are
supernatural scenes of a frighteningly effective nature and the rustic
scenes are written in the folk-idiom of the shorter songs while the
choruses are in an unsophisticated, popular style. (The Bridesmaids’
chorus in act III is actually entitled ‘Volkslied’.) The climax of the
opera occurs in act II in the Wolf’s Glen scene where the Devil, dis-
guised as the black ranger (with a speaking part harking back to the
tradition of melodrama) is engaged in casting the magic bullets. The
strength of this scene, reminiscent of the pact between Faust and the
Devil, lies in the manipulation of the orchestra which carries the burden
of increasing the tension and portraying the demonic atmosphere. In
contrast to operatic scenes of the eighteenth century, particularly in
Italian opera, few words are spoken or sung in this underworld scene.
In order to establish a diabolical and haunted atmosphere, Weber
explores the different ranges of such instruments as the clarinets and
flutes, and he never neglects the horns. This role of the orchestra as
prime mover of his drama was in the Romantic vein and German
opera was well on its way, in contrast to the Italian style where arias
continued to dominate. Later in the century this suggestive treatment
of the orchestra led to the striking success of Wagner.
Weber’s Euryanthe was an attempt to write a more ‘serious’ work,
without spoken dialogue. Euryanthe has never had any real success,
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however. In his last opera, Oberon, written for London in 1826, Weber
carried his Romantic notions concerning the role of the orchestra a step
further. About the same time the precocious Mendelssohn made an
equally original and imaginative use of the wind section of the orchestra
in his Overture to Midsummer Night’s Dream. (Mendelssohn’s subse-
quent career as a composer belongs to a later period.) Both the over-
ture to Oberon and the opera proper are dominated by the well-known
French horn call. In viewing the transition from eighteenth-century
Enlightenment to nineteenth-century Romanticism it is obvious that the
leading melody instrument of the earlier period was the violin with its
sharp, clear tone. The sound of the French horn, on the other hand,
with its overtones of vague yearning, was more suitable to the new
attitudes and the pre-occupation with new subject-matters. What is
remarkable in the case of Weber’s Oberon is the fact that the theme itself
is of such simplicity that its interest resides less in its melodic properties
than in its sonority.
The classification of composers (and poets) at the turn of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is extremely delicate and depends
on the character of the works of art produced rather than the chronology
of birth. Weber is, by common consent, a Romantic composer, yet he
was only sixteen years Beethoven’s junior and died before the older
man, in 1826. The best known works of Beethoven’s last period, the
Missa Solemnis, the Ninth Symphony, the last quartets, were all com-
posed after Weber’s Freischiitz. In literature, on the other hand, such
poets as Schlegel and Tieck were writing works of a pronouncedly
Romantic character in the 1810’s and 1820’s.
The antithesis between Romantic and Classic was a favourite topic
in the artistic controversies raging during the age of Beethoven and
Goethe. The term ‘Classic’ has its severe limitations; yet a descriptive
term is needed to serve as a contrast to the Romantic attitude. Elements
of this attitude are perceptible in Beethoven’s mature works: the
intensely personal and individual expression, the considerable length in
time which these works occupy, and the occasional programmatic
whisperings. Because of these qualities later composers venerated
Beethoven and, in order to justify their views, magnified his Romantic
leanings out of proportion. They regarded him not as the master of
formal structures but as the man who had sublimated music through his
personal emotions. They saw in the Fifth Symphony not the logical
construction but the fury that lay behind the notes. To account for the
enormous vogue of the symphonic poem in the nineteenth century, the
programme of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony (Sixth) was often
quoted as an ancestor. But whereas the slow movement of this
symphony perfectly captures the atmosphere of a rural scene, the music
itself conforms to the discipline of symphonic form. Indeed, strict self-
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discipline is never absent from Beethoven’s music, whereas the Romantic
attitude decrees absolute freedom for the composer. Even in his most
personal passages Beethoven speaks a universal language, his idiom is
that of the successor to Haydn and a contemporary of Goethe. The
tendency towards individualism and delight in the singular (and, at
times, even the freakish) belongs to a school which Beethoven influenced
profoundly but of which he was never wholly part.
In his last works Beethoven confined himself to the intimacy of the
string quartet. As early as 1798-1800 he had written a set of six quartets,
Opus 18. In many ways these works are characteristic of eighteenth-
century practices. They are, like most of the works of Haydn in this
genre, published as a group, not as single compositions. Indeed, Haydn
was largely the model of the methods of composition which Beethoven
employed. In 1806-7 Beethoven wrote Opus 59, a set of three quartets
which he dedicated to the Russian ambassador in Vienna, Count Andrey
Kyrillovich Razumovsky, who resided in Vienna from 1793 until his
death in 1836. From 1808 to 1816 the Count maintained the celebrated
Razumovsky Quartet, in which he himself played second violin. This
group later became the Schuppanzigh Quartet (with Sina as second
violinist). Among the early professional string quartets, the Schup-
panzigh ensemble is probably the most important, because its excellence
as well as its close association with Beethoven destined it to establish
a tradition of chamber music for public performance which still flourishes
today. A similarly influential professional group was founded in Berlin
by Karl Moser, who played in the private string quartet of the Prussian
King Frederick William II from 1792 to 1796. Eventually Moser
founded his own ensemble which proceeded to give regular public
performances in Berlin in 1813. Today Moser is primarily remembered
as an early champion of Beethoven, and it is characteristic of the social
changes taking place during this period that Beethoven, as well as
the Moser and Schuppanzigh quartets, experienced the transition from
royal or aristocratic patronage to reliance on the general public for
support.
The three Razumovsky quartets by Beethoven may be termed the
‘Eroica’ of Beethoven’s chamber music in that he succeeded in develop-
ing his own language for that medium. The increasing refinement and
sophistication was, alas, accompanied by an attendant loss of popularity
in the later works culminating in the so-called ‘last’ quartets, written
from 1824 onwards. At the time of their composition Beethoven’s
admirers found them completely incomprehensible and concluded that
their composer had crossed the line between unruly eccentricity and
insanity. It is worth noting that, whereas Haydn’s popularity increased
with the appearance of each new work, Mozart and Beethoven both
wrote with a sovereign disregard of the expectations of the public. The
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attitude of the later nineteenth century with its neglect of Haydn and its
deification of the demonic Mozart and of Beethoven may be traced
directly to the respective attitudes of the three composers towards their
public. The fact that Haydn was the oldest of the three is certainly
relevant. Even so, the last quartets of Beethoven are not uniformly
abstruse or difficult, rather they are remarkable for their wide range of
expression. The Alla Danza Tedesca of Opus 130 is of great simplicity,
suggesting the style of the eighteenth century. The same is true of the
Alla Marcia of Opus 132. This simple march follows an intimate and
unusual movement entitled ‘Thanksgiving from one recovering from
an illness, to the Deity, in the Lydian Mode’. It was written after
Beethoven’s recovery from a serious illness in 1825. In this movement
the employment of one of the old church modes, as well as the treat-
ment of the melody in contrapuntal fashion, lends to the music an
ethereal quality; at the same time this procedure marks a tendency
which became increasingly prominent as the nineteenth century pro-
gressed and which may be summed up in the term historicism. The
fascination of Palestrina’s sixteenth-century contrapuntal technique for
composers of the early nineteenth century was combined with a yearn-
ing for purity in an age that considered itself to be decadent and
sullied. A similar attraction lay in the Gregorian chant and its modes;
here a direct line of descent may be perceived from Beethoven’s Lydian
Thanksgiving movement to Berlioz’ quotation of the Dies Irae and to
the employment of the Phrygian mode in Brahms’s Fourth Symphony.
These musical phenomena are cognate to the fascination of Gothic
architecture in the early nineteenth century. It is well to remember
the efforts of Boisseree and Goethe to raise funds for the restoration of
Cologne Cathedral. Again, it should be emphasised that this enchant-
ment with the past, which was to become so compelling in scholarship
as well as art, is an element in Beethoven’s Quartet, Opus 132, but does
not by any means constitute the dominant feature. Another aspect of
these last quartets is the scope they offered in fugal technique. Fugal
passages occur as well in other works of Beethoven, notably in the
Third and Ninth Symphonies. Beethoven’s interest in the fugue, like
that of Haydn and Mozart, was based on the familiarity he had gained
with Bach’s works at the house of Baron van Swieten. The increase of
fugal passages and even entire movements in fugue after 1815 is very
marked. The cello sonata, Opus 102, led to the piano sonata, Opus no.
The climax was reached in the quartets, Opus 131 and Opus 133. It is
as if Beethoven wished to encircle the force of his expression by an
ancient and almost impersonal technique of composition. The results,
though abstruse to most of his contemporaries, have elicited whole-
hearted admiration from nineteenth- and twentieth-century listeners.
When Beethoven died in 1827 Europe as a whole recognised that it had
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lost the greatest musician of its time. Schubert’s death, only a year
later, was scarcely noticed.
The development of modern art song is beholden to German leader-
ship in the same way that the history of opera is the glory of Italy.
The new secular non-operatic songs, performed by professionals in a
concert hall, for the benefit of a paying public, constituted a quite
different category from the folk and love songs of an immemorial age.
The new genre required a serious, dedicated approach on the part of
the audience; a training, not restricted to opera, on the part of the
singer; and a pianist capable of executing a demanding accompani-
ment which, in its complexities, resembled a modem symphony rather
than the strumming of a guitar. These were some of the social and
technical prerequisites of Romantic songs, but the new German lied
still required a composer of genius to give it wing. He emerged in the
person of a Viennese school-teacher, Franz Schubert (1797-1828).
Schubert’s ‘ Erlkonig ’ of 1815 is as incredible as Monteverdi’s Orfeo
of 1607, for the one inaugurated art song as authoritatively as the other
initiated opera. And thanks to Schubert and his successors, Schumann,
Brahms and Wolf, a song recital without German lieder has become as
untypical as an operatic recital without Italian arias.
The developments that led to Schubert’s mode of composition were
brief. The early publications of the so-called first Berlin song school
appeared in the 1750’s. With the sole exception of Emanuel Bach, these
composers were soon forgotten, although their innovations remained to
influence a later generation. By turning away from operatic arias,
minuets and other dances to which fashionable verses might be fitted,
and by directing attention to folk-song or quasi-folk-song, in harmony
with the ideals of Rousseau, the first Berlin song school created the
thoughtful and soulful kind of song we know today.
The significant publications of the second Berlin school appeared
approximately between 1790 and 1810. J. A. P. Schulz, J. F. Reichardt,
K. F. Zelter and others had profited from the experiments of Emanuel
Bach and proceeded to write melodies that would be suitable for the
new poetry of Germany, of which Goethe and Schiller were the
protagonists. Still, the very term ‘melody’ indicates musical limitations.
For one thing, the piano accompaniment was frequently relegated to
an optional, if not altogether a subordinate role:
The melodies of songs in which anyone who has ears and a throat can join, must
be able to stand on their own, independent of all accompaniment, and must ... so
catch the mood of the song that after a single hearing one can no longer imagine the
melody without the words or the words without the melody. . . . Such a melody
. . . will therefore neither require nor indeed permit any accompanying harmony. 1
1 J. F. Reichardt, 1781. The entire excerpt is quoted by A. Einstein, Schubert (London,
1951), P- 28.
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Another restriction lay in the nature of strophic poetry. Following the
rule in folk-song Goethe and Schiller felt strongly that the same melody
should accompany each stanza of a poem. Adjustments of tempo and
dynamics were deemed sufficient to convey the necessary nuances of
feeling. These intellectual and poetic foundations were duly respected
by the composers of the second Berlin song school.
Schubert venerated Goethe’s poetry but could not accept the poet’s
restrictions. He continued to write full-blooded music which developed
as the mood or the action of the poem developed. As a result, the songs
that do Schubert honour are either free, that is, non-strophic, or
settings of poems which consist of only one stanza and consequently do
not shackle the composer’s inspiration. Of Schubert’s 660 songs about
one-tenth were settings of the poetry of Goethe. Schubert was eighteen
years old when he composed the ‘ Erlkonig ’ in 1815. The most remark-
able portion of the song is the poignant dissonance expressing the cry of
pain of the child. Schubert intensified his effect by sequencing the
phrase a semitone higher each time it appears in successive stanzas.
This means of creating a cumulative impact would not have been
possible in the strophic procedure of Schubert’s predecessors. 1
The ‘ Erlkonig ’ was offered to the famous Leipzig publishing house of
Breitkopf and Haertel by friends of the composer two years after its
composition. The publishers submitted it, for an opinion, to the German
composer Franz Schubert of Dresden. This unfortunate namesake,
whose only claim to immortality resides in this episode, was emphatic
‘that this cantata was never written by me’. He continued that he was
eager to investigate ‘who it was that had the discourtesy to send you
such trash and also to discover the fellow who has thus misused my
name’. The song was finally published by Cappi and Diabelli of
Vienna in 1821. But the contretemps of 1817 throws light on the new
type of composer which Romanticism had spawned, Bohemian by
nature, and a misunderstood genius. Friction between conservative
publishers and critics and composers whose music sounded either too
old or too new was certainly not restricted to the works of Schubert;
the unpopularity of Bach’s fugues and Beethoven’s last quartets immedi-
ately comes to mind. But these earlier composers had incomes sub-
stantial enough (and also a sufficient number of acceptable compositions
to their credit) to permit them to risk a certain amount of experi-
mentation. With Schubert’s generation there began the tradition of the
artist as a social misfit in a philistine, bourgeois environment. This
tradition is epitomised in Mahler’s dictum ‘I compose for posterity’
and in the popular images of Schubert, Chopin and Liszt conveyed by
novels, musicals and screen-plays.
1 Concerning Goethe’s opposition to this free treatment of strophic texts, cf. Einstein,
op. cit., p. 45; also Musical Quarterly, vol. xxxv (New York, 1949), pp. 511-27.
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The setting of Goethe’s ‘ Ueber alien Gipfeln ist Ruh\ composed in
1822, is Schubert’s most successful composition of a single stanza.
Schubert matches the brevity of the poetic model in a new conciseness of
musical expression, the irregularity of length of Goethe’s lines by the
freedom of musical phrases; and to these achievements adds the
poignant contrary motion between the vocal line and the piano
accompaniment.
Lastly, a word must be said about Schubert’s settings of the poetry
of the Schlegel brothers, composed in 1818-19. The text of i Vom
Mitleiden Mariae ’ exemplifies the religious attitude postulated by the
Mediaevalism of the nineteenth century, while its chromaticism is
reminiscent of Sebastian Bach and anticipates, sit venia verbo, Hinde-
mith. There are, besides, the three settings of sonnets by Petrarch, in
the German translation of A. W. Schlegel. Schubert’s fascination with
these literary ‘soundpieces’ distinguishes his work from that of the
Berlin song school to the same degree that the craze for sonnets became
a hallmark of the Romantic poets in their rebellion against the old
regime. Now the sonnet, so harshly criticised by Moliere and Boileau,
was rediscovered and imitated by Wordsworth and A. W. Schlegel.
It is one more facet of the general European tendency toward irrational
sound patterns. Schubert’s novel attitude as a composer was to be
emulated by Mendelssohn and Liszt.
Although Schubert wrote exquisite songs at a surprisingly early age,
time was needed before he found his own idiom in instrumental music.
The early symphonies were written in the shadow of Schubert’s great
predecessors and, in fact, his gift as a song writer seems to have hindered
him in the composition of his symphonies and string quartets. The
regularity of metre, the repetition of melodies weakened the structure
of absolute music. A change of style is noticeable around 1820;
between that year and Schubert’s death in 1828, that is, between the
ages of twenty-three and thirty-one, he wrote his significant works,
eschewing the style of the eighteenth century and attaining an in-
dividuality of full stature that had been merely hinted at earlier. It is
characteristic of nineteenth-century Romanticism that the titles and
nicknames of Schubert’s most successful works, the ‘Unfinished
Symphony’ of 1822 and the C Major Symphony ‘of the heavenly
length’ of 1828 are contradictions in terms.
Schumann first talked of the heavenly length of the great C Major
Symphony. It goes without saying that length, once the listener
becomes aware of it, is inevitably a disadvantage in an art whose
dimension is in time. The extending of the time dimension to un-
reasonable and unheard-of proportions was eventually to bring forth
tetralogies of operas and symphonies of gigantic length and resources.
It is also characteristic of the Romantic attitude that Schubert should
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have allowed his ‘Unfinished Symphony’ to stand as such, in two move-
ments. The reasons for his not completing the work have never been
clear. But unfinished as the symphony may have been in a formal
sense, it has proved entirely satisfactory to romantically disposed
audiences. Another seemingly self-contradictory feature permeates
both these symphonies as well as many other works of Schubert,
namely, the interfusion of the symphonic and lyrical genres. The
relentless reduction of thematic material to groups of three and two
notes, even one note, seems alien to the lyrical temperament. Yet,
nowhere have singing themes been integrated into a genuinely symphonic
form so successfully as in the last works of Schubert. Moreover, these
themes, once stated, were lavishly repeated in their original melodic
shape.
The ceaseless repetitions that would be tiresome in a composer of
lesser stature, and the very expanse of time in Schubert’s works, are
mitigated by his novel use of colour. He achieves new colour by re-
stating his melodies, either in a different key or in another scoring, and
sometimes both key and scoring are altered. The variety of hues which
the composer could extract from his scheme of tonality and from the
available sonorities of the orchestra yielded a distension that was unique
both in the genre of the symphony and in that of chamber music. It
was also characteristic of the period which Schubert initiated that the
darker and softer colours should be preferred. His method of presenting
his second subject-group more than once, arousing in the audience an
ever-new interest in the progress of tonality and sonority, has hardly
ever been rivalled.
No other tune depicts this preoccupation with colour for its own sake
and with sound for the sake of a sound better than the horn melody
which opens, unaccompanied, Schubert’s last symphony in C. major.
In this extensive and prominent passage the abdication of the role
which violins had occupied in the eighteenth century is even more
pronounced than in Weber’s Oberon or Mendelssohn’s Midsummer
Night's Dream Overture. It was only natural that the Romantic
fascination with sheer sound should reach its crowning effect in the art
of music. Yet, the attitude behind this ardour was not restricted to
musicians. It had, in fact, been articulated by poets decades earlier.
In 1778, with the publication of the second volume of his History of
English Poetry, Thomas Warton translated an excerpt from the medieval
French Lai du Corn. The English version speaks of the magic horn
‘where were hanging an hundred little bells ... if any gently struck the
horn with his finger, the hundred bells sounded so sweetly that neither
harp nor viol nor the sports of a virgin nor the sirens of the sea could
ever give such music’. The passage made a deep impression on the
German Romanticists as, indeed, did Warton’s enthusiasm for the art
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of the past altogether. When Arnim and Brentano were to publish
their important folksong collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn in 1805,
Warton’s description of the magic horn provided them with the very
title and also the title-plate of their collection. Thus scholars and poets
had been praising the magic sonority of the horn for some time, but it
was left to the orchestral arts of Weber and Schubert to suggest and
interpret it in the actual sound of the modem symphony orchestra.
The author wishes to acknowledge his indebtedness to Mr Edward Olleson
(Christ Church, Oxford), for his assistance in the preparation of this survey.
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CHAPTER IX
THE BALANCE OF POWER DURING THE WARS,
1793-1814
T he successive coalitions organised to resist French expansion
during the period of the Revolution and the Empire followed a
general pattern and policy which had well-established precedents
in European diplomacy. Since the close of the Middle Ages any dynasty
or state that threatened to achieve a dominant position on the con-
tinent had been checked by a coalition of its neighbours. This tradi-
tional response, often described as the policy of maintaining a balance of
power, operated in an intermittent fashion. It was not a consistent policy
but rather a collective response to a recurrent danger. During the
intervals when the states of Europe existed in an uneasy equilibrium
the balance of power as a principle attracted little attention. Only when
some powerful and militant state, by a dynamic expansion of its in-
fluence and territory, created a manifest imbalance in the European
system, did the remaining states compose their differences sufficiently
to co-operate in restoring a balance. How unstable such coalitions might
prove, and how vulnerable they were to dissolution after a defeat or a
victory, the vicissitudes of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars
repeatedly demonstrated.
Throughout most of the eighteenth century the European system
remained fairly stable. From the early years of that century, when the
War of the Spanish Succession finally checked the ascendancy France
had gained under Louis XIV, until the final decade when the victories
of the revolutionary armies again made France a threat, the balance of
power in Europe was not seriously disturbed. It is true that the naval,
commercial and colonial successes won by Great Britain made the
eighteenth century a period of British ascendancy. But British colonial
acquisitions on other continents did not unsettle the balance of power
within Europe itself; on the contrary British interests demanded the
preservation of that balance. There can be no question, however, that
to the governments of Europe the British triumphs in the Seven Years
War appeared excessive. When the thirteen American colonies revolted
in 1776, and Britain failed to crush the rebellion promptly, France,
Spain and the Dutch Republic sought revenge for the colonies the
British had taken from them by helping to disrupt the British Empire.
Furthermore, six other European states associated themselves in a
‘League of Armed Neutrality’ to resist the arbitrary use the British
made of their superior sea power. The War of American Independence
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represented a reverse for Great Britain and in that sense a reaffirmation
of the ideal of equilibrium.
Yet so delicately established, so sensitive, was the equipoise, that any
diminution of power or prestige in one area invited further displace-
ments. With Britain temporarily humiliated, and France progressively
weakened by maladministration, bankruptcy, and (after 1789) internal
revolution, the three remaining great powers, Austria, Russia and
Prussia, became more enterprising. All three had gained territory
through the First Partition of Poland, negotiated in 1772. In 1774
Russia advanced its frontiers at the expense of the Ottoman Empire.
In 1779 Austria and Prussia agreed on some mutual gains in the
Germanies. In 1783 Russia annexed the Crimea, and in 1792 Russian
forces drove the Turks as far as the Dniester River. As it had long
been an article of French foreign policy to support Poland and Turkey,
these events demonstrated the extent to which French influence in
Europe had declined.
This apparent weakness of France was the more surprising because
France possessed greater resources for war than any other contempor-
ary European power. In the absence of dependable statistics it is not
possible to fix the population totals toward the close of the eighteenth
century with any exactitude. But it is certain that France, with twenty
to twenty-five million inhabitants, enjoyed singular advantages.
Numerically, it is true, the Holy Roman Empire and the Russian
Empire probably had a small lead, for in each the population may have
reached twenty-five to thirty mill ion. But the Holy Roman Empire was
not a unified state and Russia suffered from a retarded economy.
Spain, with some ten million people, had become a second class power.
Italy, with fifteen million, remained weak and divided. Only Great
Britain could match France in the vigour, enlightenment and relative
homogeneity of its people, but her total population was less than ten
million in 1789— less, that is, than half the population of France. With
Ireland included, the British Isles then held about fourteen million
inhabitants, approximately two-thirds of the number ruled by the King
of France.
Neither the French foreign office nor French military science could be
fairly blamed for the ineffectiveness of French policy on the eve of the
Revolution. Extravagance at court, waste and inefficiency in fiscal
matters, lack of vigour and direction in the royal councils, all these
combined to weaken French power and prestige. But as a number of
historians, including Albert Sorel and Frederic Masson, have em-
phasised, the Department of Foreign Affairs was the best served,
best informed and most industrious branch of the French bureaucracy
at the close of the old regime. Its traditions and part of its personnel were
carried into the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. A s imilar tribute
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should be paid to the French military thinkers of the later eighteenth
century. The most significant advance made in the military art on the
eve of the Revolution was the improvement of artillery and in this
France took the lead after 1776 under the energetic direction of Jean
Baptiste de Gribeauval. Other military critics, notably the Comte de
Guibert, urged the advantages of raising a popular army and en-
couraging a spirit of individual initiative in the soldiers. He also
stressed the need to seek great mobility by splitting armies into divisions
and reducing their interminable baggage trains. Roman legions, he
pointed out, lived off the countries they invaded and made campaigns
pay for themselves in booty and indemnities. Here in essence could be
found most of the new principles of improved morale and rapid
marches and manoeuvres that were to distinguish the French revolu-
tionary armies.
If the French had been ruled by a less apathetic monarch than Louis
XVI, if the ministers had been less distracted by the domestic crisis,
France might have secured reciprocal compensations for the gains
made by Russia, Prussia and Austria in the i78o’s. After 1789 the
mounting disorders, the weakening of the royal authority, and the
flight of the emigres (including many army officers) reduced French
prestige still further. Austria, meanwhile, which had been disorganised
by the precipitate reforms of Joseph II, recovered swiftly after Joseph
died in January 1790. Within six months his successor Leopold II
achieved a minor diplomatic revolution by reaching an accord with the
Prussians. To embarrass Austria, Prussia had made an alliance with the
Turks and had encouraged the Hungarians and the people of the
Austrian Netherlands (Belgium) to defy the government at Vienna.
Freed from Prussian intrigues, Leopold speedily reconciled the Hun-
garian nobles and repressed the Belgian revolt. By 1791 he also made
peace with the Turks, a move for which the British government had
been pressing because a successful Austro-Russian war against the
Ottoman Empire might have threatened Constantinople.
The recovery of Austria in 1 790-1 was paralleled by the increasing dis-
order in France. The National Assembly dissolved itself in September,
1791, with the announcement that the Revolution was over, and the
Legislative Assembly, duly elected under the new constitution, took its
place. In reality, the Revolution was still gathering momentum, and
within six months the Legislative Assembly voted to declare war on the
Austrian emperor. The ostensible grievances were less significant than
the hidden motives. Some German princes who also held lands in
Alsace denied the power of a French assembly to abolish their feudal
privileges there. Pope Pius VI protested against the confiscation of
Church property in France and the annexation of Avignon. The
revolutionaries at Paris, for their part, had a growing list of counter-
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charges against Leopold II. He allowed emigres to organise armed
bands on the borders of France. On 6 July 1791, he invited the powers
to join him in putting an end to the dangerous extremes of the Revolu-
tion, and on 27 August Austria and Prussia announced in the joint
declaration of Pillnitz that they regarded the situation of Louis XVI as
a matter of interest to all European sovereigns.
These diplomatic warnings were largely a bluster by which Leopold
hoped to intimidate the revolutionary leaders and protect his sister
Marie Antoinette and her husband Louis XVI. The royal pair had
appealed to him for aid, offering their gratitude as compensation, but
gratitude was not enough. French royalists, who hoped to see the
Revolution crushed by foreign troops, likewise lacked a fulcrum power-
ful enough to move armies. By the close of 1791, however, many
members of the French Legislative Assembly had likewise come to
favour a war, though for opposite reasons. ‘It may be,’ Georges
Couthon wrote to his constituents in December, ‘that as a matter of
sound and wise policy the Revolution has need of a war to consolidate
it.’ 1 In the spring of 1792 the war fever in Paris rose rapidly, and despite
the sudden death of Leopold II on 1 March, the Assembly voted for
war on 20 April with only seven dissenting voices. So, through mixed
motives and contradictory calculations, began a conflict that was to
plague Europe for twenty-three years.
Prussia supported Austria, and their joint forces pushed into France
in the summer of 1792. The emigres, living in a world of illusions,
assured the invaders they would be welcomed as liberators; instead the
French peasants received them with sullen hostility. By September
their slow advance had carried the allied forces as far as Valmy, a
hundred miles east of Paris. There an artillery duel fought in a heavy
fog discouraged the commanders and the invasion was called off for that
year. The cabinets at Vienna and Berlin judged that the French problem
could wait until increasing disorganisation made France more vul-
nerable. For the moment they turned their attention to the Polish
question which appeared to them more critical and more urgent.
Sobered by the First Partition of 1772 the Poles attempted to organise
and defend the reduced territory that remained to them, but the
Russians were unwilling to permit a Polish revival. In 1792 Russian
armies assailed the truncated Polish state and the need to limit the
Russian advance became a matter of urgent concern, not only in
Vienna and Berlin, but in London, Stockholm and Constantinople.
At St Petersburg, the Tsarina Catherine measured the stiffening opposi-
tion and decided to compromise. Ignoring Austria, she bought Prussian
assistance by offering a share of the spoils. The Second Partition of
Poland, arranged by the two powers in January 1793, left one-third of
1 Correspondance de G. A. Couthon, ed. Francisque Mege (Paris, 1872), p. 57.
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the realm independent. For the Poles the respite was to be brief and
valueless, but for the French the distraction provided by the Polish
crisis was providential.
The French ‘victory’ at Valmy coincided with the opening session of
a new, hastily-elected National Convention at Paris. A revolutionary
mob had already overturned the throne (August 1792). The Convention
proclaimed France a republic, offered French aid to all peoples who
wished to overthrow their oppressors, and condemned Louis XVI to the
guillotine (January 1793). A sudden change in the military situation
partly explains these acts of reckless defiance. Following the with-
drawal of the allied forces after Valmy, the French became invaders in
their turn. Within three months they occupied Mainz, Speier and
Brussels and annexed Savoy and Nice. Intoxicated by these triumphs,
and angered by the wave of protests that greeted the execution of
Louis, the regicide Convention declared war against Great Britain and
the Dutch Republic in February 1793, and against Spain in March.
British diplomacy, naval pressure and subsidies rapidly extended the
list of allies. Portugal, Piedmont-Sardinia, the Papal States and the
Kingdom of Naples joined the circle. Prussia, Austria, Baden, Wiirttem-
berg, Bavaria, and lesser German states negotiated conventions with
London. Russia cancelled its trade treaty with France, and Catherine
promised the British she would not come to terms with the French nor
recognise their conquests, but her price was British silence on the fate of
Poland.
The multiple assault unleashed by the allies forced the French back
from the Rhine and expelled them from the Austrian Netherlands. But
the allied armies lacked unity of direction and within France the defences
held. By September 1793, as the Republic began its second year, the
revolutionary generals resumed the offensive and the ‘victories of the
Year Two’ cleared France of invaders. Counter-revolutionary opposi-
tion in the Vendee smouldered on, but by the summer of 1794 the
extremity that had appeared to justify the Reign of Terror passed.
Robespierre was overthrown (27 July 1794) and the Committee of
Public Safety was stripped of its despotic powers. But the titanic defence
effort militarised the Revolution. The prestige of the legislators declined
while that of the successful generals rose. After 1794 the political
trimmers in Paris became increasingly dependent on the support of the
republican army and on the tribute wrung from ‘liberated’ provinces.
French troops lived off the areas they invaded and when Belgians,
Dutch, Germans and Italians in the border regions protested at the
cost of French occupation they were told it was impossible to buy
liberty too dearly.
As soon as it became apparent that France could not easily be
dismembered or loaded with indemnities the First Coalition crumbled.
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The Prussians, fearing that Catherine would win what remained of
Poland, made peace in March 1795, conceding France the left bank of
the Rhine. Three months later Spain came to terms, yielding Santo
Domingo to the French. Confronted by the French successes, Russia,
Prussia and Austria had already secured compensation elsewhere. The
Third Partition of Poland (January 1795) divided the remaining frag-
ment of that country among its three neighbours. At the same time
these three eastern powers concluded secret agreements of wider
import. If Austria failed to recover its Belgian provinces from France it
might receive Bavaria as compensation, or the territories of the Venetian
Republic. Furthermore, Austria and Russia reaffirmed their intention,
when conditions proved favourable, of dividing the sultan’s European
possessions on the lines proposed by Catherine and Joseph II in 1782.
It was significant that the agreements of 1795 tacitly conceded the
aggrandisement of France while envisaging a restoration of equilibrium
by reciprocal compensations for the other continental powers. But the
accommodations possessed two defects. The recompense promised
Austria (aside from its Polish gains) lay in the future, while Britain was
offered no quid pro quo, either for the French conquest of the Belgian
provinces or for the Polish areas assimilated by the three eastern powers.
Britain and Austria, therefore, had reasons for continuing the war
against France. By the close of 1795 these reasons gained added weight
because the French, having defeated the Dutch Republic, reorganised
it as the Batavian Republic in close alliance with France. This con-
solidated the French hold on the Belgian provinces. The British re-
taliated by seizing Dutch possessions overseas. Ceylon and Cape Town
passed under their control (1795-6), but these distant gains seemed
inadequate when matched against the aggrandisement of the European
powers.
After 1795 the French directed their military efforts against the two
powers that still refused to recognise their gains. They could not attack
Britain directly so they turned on Austria. In 1796 Bonaparte opened his
first Italian campaign, forcing the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia to
make peace and to recognise the French annexation of Nice and Savoy.
The pope was obliged to yield the Romagna, Bologna and Ferrara.
French domination replaced the Austrian ascendancy in the Italian
Peninsula, and Bonaparte’s inspired generalship defeated the Austrians
repeatedly, until, in April 1797, they agreed to a truce. By the Peace of
Campo Formio, concluded the following October, Austria gained
Venice, Istria and Dalmatia, and a promise that France would use its
influence to help the emperor also obtain Salzburg and part of Bavaria.
In return the Austrians abandoned the Belgian provinces and the left
bank of the Rhine to France, and recognised the Cisalpine and Ligurian
republics established under French influence in northern Italy.
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The First Coalition had now dissolved entirely, but the British still
refused to make peace. France, under the government of the Directory
since 1795, expected its most successful general to bring Britain to terms.
An invasion across the Channel seemed to Bonaparte too hazardous
(French expeditions to support rebellions in Ireland had failed re-
peatedly). Instead he embarked 35,000 men at Toulon (May 1798) for
an invasion of Egypt. Evading the British Mediterranean squadron,
and capturing Malta on the way, he landed at Alexandria in July.
Nelson promptly stranded him there by destroying his ships (Battle of
the Nile, 1 August 1798).
The position of France, when Bonaparte sailed for Egypt, appeared
secure. The republic had achieved what Louis XIV failed to accom-
plish, advancing the French frontiers to their ‘natural’ limits, the
Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees. Furthermore, to make these frontiers
stronger, the revolutionary government had transformed the Dutch
Netherlands into a client state, the Batavian Republic. In the south the
annexation of Nice and the creation of another client state, the Ligurian
Republic (Genoa), gave French armies control of the coast route into
Italy, where the Ligurian border touched that of the Cisalpine Republic
dominating the Po valley. These dispositions not only isolated Piedmont
and Parma, they limited Austrian influence to the area north of the Adige
river. The keys to the Italian Peninsula were in French hands, and the
profits that might be obtained by ‘liberating’ central and southern
Italy made such a course an almost irresistible temptation to the
republican generals.
In February 1798, the French entered Rome where they made Pius VI
a prisoner and proclaimed a republic. In April they occupied Switzer-
land. By the close of the year they had seized Piedmont, and early in
1799 they changed the Neapolitan kingdom into the Parthenopean
Republic and drove the Grand Duke of Tuscany from Florence. The
advance of the French into southern Italy, the fact that they held the
Ionian Islands and Malta, and that Bonaparte was advancing into
Syria, made French domination of the Levant a possibility. For the
first time the successes of the revolutionary armies threatened an area
for which the Russians felt an acute concern. Paul I, who had succeeded
his mother Catherine in 1796, welcomed suggestions from London that
he take the lead in organising a Second Coalition against France.
The proposals that Pitt dispatched to St Petersburg in November
1798 provided the programme for a Second Coalition and invited
Tsar Paul to take the lead in promoting it. More than that, they proved
remarkably prophetic in their anticipation of the settlement hammered
out at the Vienna Congress sixteen years later. France, Pitt suggested,
should be reduced to its pre-revolutionary frontiers. The Dutch
Republic must be restored to independence and might be strengthened
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against future French aggression by uniting it with the Belgian
provinces. Switzerland must likewise regain its territory and inde-
pendence. As compensation for the loss of the Belgian provinces,
Austria would receive Italian territory, while Prussia (as an inducement
to join the Coalition) would be offered compensation in the Germanies.
To guard the passes from France to Italy, the Kingdom of Piedmont-
Sardinia should be restored and strengthened by the recovery of Savoy.
Unfortunately for Pitt’s hopes, Prussia did not join the Second Coali-
tion; and Russia, Austria and Britain did not exchange the pledges he
proposed, namely, that they bind themselves not to make peace
separately.
The three powers drafted plans to drive the French from German
territory, from the Netherlands, from Italy and from Switzerland. By
the summer of 1799 the French were forced across the Rhine and
suffered severe defeats in Italy and Switzerland. The Russians under
Suvorov and Korsakov carried a heavy share of the fighting in the
Italian and Swiss campaigns and grew increasingly dissatisfied with their
British and Austrian allies. In October the French resistance stiffened.
Massena forced the Russians out of Switzerland while Brune defeated
and expelled an Anglo-Russian army that attempted to invade Holland.
Stung by the reverses and the suffering of his troops. Tsar Paul decided
to withdraw Russia from the coalition (22 October 1799). The same
week Bonaparte reappeared in Paris, having left his marooned forces
in Egypt. On 9 November the coup d'etat of Brumaire ended the dis-
credited Directory and established the provisional Consulate. By the
close of the year 1799 Bonaparte had consolidated his authority as
first consul and head of the French Republic.
The French nation, after ten years of revolution, desired a re-
establishment of order and stability. But the governments of the other
powers, after eight years of war and shifting alliances, wanted reciprocal
compensation for the gains made by the French republic. Had
Bonaparte been content to consolidate France within the ‘natural
frontiers ’ it had attained, while allowing the other powers comparable
annexations, it is possible the fifteen years of war that followed might
have been averted. But to secure the conquests of the Revolution he
insisted on transcending them, while denying the other powers adequate
advantages. In other words, he sought to confirm and augment the
ascendancy of France, and this meant keeping Europe in a state of dis-
equilibrium.
On Bonaparte, therefore, must rest the heaviest share of responsi-
bility for the ‘Napoleonic Wars’. Yet a survey of the diplomatic
projects under consideration in other capitals during the period 1800-13
helps to explain why Britain, Russia, Prussia and Austria failed for
thirteen years to unite in a quadruple alliance against France. Of these
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four powers, Britain alone remained firm in its opposition to the
French expansion. Russia, Prussia and Austria each revealed a willing-
ness to ally itself with France if offered a sufficient territorial inducement.
The jealousy and suspicion which the four governments entertained
toward one another gave Napoleon plentiful opportunities to profit by
their antagonisms. His foreign policy, insofar as he may be said to have
had any consistent foreign policy, was to keep at least one of the great
powers as an ally while coping with the others. For this role of collabor-
ator he chose in turn first Prussia, then Russia, and finally Austria. But
to none did he concede the full inducements he had promised, and each
in turn found its co-operation with France a humiliation and a dis-
illusionment. To the last, however, Napoleon cherished the belief that
every government had its price and that he could lure any of the powers
(except Great Britain) back to his side if he offered a sufficiently
tempting bribe.
How successfully Bonaparte could divide his foes he demonstrated
in the negotiations of 1800 and 1801. As Russia had withdrawn from
the Second Coalition at the close of 1799, the opportunity to secure the
good will of the erratic Tsar Paul could not be neglected. The French
held 7000 Russian prisoners and neither Austria nor Britain would make
a sacrifice to obtain their release. Bonaparte shamed Paul’s late allies
by returning the prisoners, fully equipped, without compensation, a
shrewd move because the Tsar had a fatherly affection for his soldiers.
Following this overture came a proposal from the first consul that Paul,
recently elected Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, should take the
island under Russian protection. The French forces which had seized
Malta in 1798 were blockaded in Valetta and on the point of sur-
render (they capitulated to the British 5 September 1800). Britain had
promised Malta to Russia in 1798, but now, as Bonaparte had cor-
rectly anticipated, the cabinet at London declined to entrust its new
conquest to the tsar’s keeping. Paul reacted by reviving the Armed
Neutrality of the North to oppose British sea power and made plans to
dispatch an army against the British in India.
How unscrupulously Bonaparte worked on Paul’s vanity and inflated
his expectations may be gathered from a project the Russian chancellor,
Count Feodor Rostopchin, drafted for his master on 1 October 1800.
He proposed a dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire that would
assign Moldavia, Bulgaria, and probably Roumelia and Constantinople
to Russia. France could keep Egypt, while Austria would be placated
with Bosnia, Serbia and Wallachia. As Prussia did not covet Ottoman
territory, its consent could be purchased by allowing it to annex Hanover,
Munster and Paderborn. Britain must be compelled to agree (without
compensation for the loss of Hanover) by the (revived) League of
Armed Neutrality which France and Spain would join.
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These grandiose plans collapsed, along with the Franco-Russian
rapprochement, when Paul was strangled (n March 1801) by a group
of palace conspirators, who proclaimed his son tsar as Alexander I.
It is not surprising that Bonaparte chose to believe a stroke so opportune
in easing British anxiety had been inspired from London.
At the Viennese court, hopes of Habsburg aggrandisement alternated
with despair in 1800 and 1801. Like Russia and Prussia, Austria was
willing to seek Bonaparte’s friendship if the results promised an advan-
tage. But Paul’s desertion of the Second Coalition left Austria more
dependent on British support and the British were not ready to yield.
Baron Thugut, to whom the Emperor Francis II had entrusted the
conduct of foreign affairs since 1793, played a tortuous game. Whether
he was involved in the murder of two French delegates, when they were
leaving the abortive congress on German affairs at Rastatt in 1799, is
uncertain. But his lack of scruples, his plebeian birth, and his devious
diplomacy made him unpopular. From Britain he obtained an addi-
tional subsidy of two million pounds (20 June 1800) on the condition
that Austria would not conclude a separate peace with France before
28 February 1801. Napoleon’s victory at Marengo the same week,
however, once again destroyed the Austrian ascendancy in Italy and
brought a temporary truce. In September Thugut resigned, and Prince
Colloredo as chancellor and Count Louis Cobenzl as vice-chancellor
sought terms from Napoleon. The latter decided to reopen hostilities,
and Moreau’s victory over the Austrians at Hohenlinden (3 December
1800) ended the war. Austria accepted the Peace of Luneville, signed
9 February 1801.
The terms of the Luneville treaty are often described as a recapitula-
tion of those concluded at Campo Formio four years earlier. In
actuality they were more extensive and more humiliating for Austria.
Its influence in Italy was again halted at the Adige river; its protege,
the Grand Duke of Tuscany, lost his dominions; and Francis II
had to accept the peace terms as a commitment affecting the entire
Germanic empire. By these conditions Bonaparte not only reaffirmed
the French ascendancy in the Italian Peninsula; he involved Austria
in his plans for a rearrangement of the Germanies. The larger states
there had long sought to annex their smaller neighbours, some
three hundred ecclesiastical holdings, free towns, and minor heredi-
tary domains. Austria, pursuing a policy of divide and rule, had sup-
ported the multiple divisions of the Germanies. With Austrian power
weakened, ambitious German princes turned to Paris. Their ‘gifts’ to
the French minister for foreign affairs, the astute but venal Talleyrand,
laid the basis of his private fortune. A process of amalgamation com-
menced that was to reduce three hundred German states to less than
forty.
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Bonaparte explained his evolving plans for the Germanies in a
private note to Talleyrand dated 3 April 1802:
I desire to pursue three separate negotiations: one with Russia, in the form of a
gentlemanly discussion, designed to commit that power as deeply as possible to
arrangements that serve our aims; the second with the Court of Berlin to adjust
affairs which concern it, such as those of the Prince of Orange, the Elector of Bavaria
and the Elector of Baden; the third with Austria, in order to conclude with her the
arrangements relative to the Grand Duke of Tuscany. By these means the German
Empire will find itself in reality divided in two, for its affairs will be directed from
two different centres. Assuming these arrangements successful, would the con-
stitution of Germany still exist? Yes and no; yes, because it would not have been
abolished; no, because its affairs would no longer be ordered as a whole and there
would be more opposition than ever between Berlin and Vienna. Time and other
considerations would then decide our policy. 1
In his diplomatic as in his military campaigns Bonaparte sought to
constrict an opponent’s area of operations while preserving his own
freedom of action. He took the position that each of the other powers
had a limited sphere of interest and that when changes were made out-
side its sphere a power need not be consulted. By his reasoning the
interior of Europe lay outside the British sphere of interest. For
France, however, he endeavoured to assert a universal claim and the
right to concern himself with all areas and all issues. This arrogant
attitude was strikingly demonstrated in the secret negotiations he con-
ducted with Spain. By a preliminary accord reached at San Ildefonso
(1 October 1800) and confirmed in the convention of Aranjuez (21
March 1801), Spain retroceded Louisiana to France and in return
Bonaparte established the ‘Kingdom of Etruria’ in Italy for a daughter
and son-in-law of the Spanish king, Charles IV. He also obtained
Spanish aid in bringing Portugal to terms. That smaller Iberian kingdom
had been at war with France since 1793 and depended on British aid and
trade. In the spring of 1801 the realisation that he could not hold Egypt
against the British moved Bonaparte to strike back at them through their
ally, Portugal. On the advance of Spanish and French forces, the
Portuguese yielded, ceding part of their territory to Spain, and a
segment of Portuguese Guiana to France (6 June 1801).
French threats to annex the whole of Portugal hastened the negotia-
tions for peace between Britain and France. The British cabinet, headed
by the younger Pitt, resigned (5 February 1801) when George III
refused his assent to a measure for removing the disabilities imposed on
Roman Catholics. It is possible that Pitt, and the foreign secretary
William Grenville, foreseeing that a peace would be concluded, pre-
ferred to avoid the responsibility for concessions they judged unsound.
Certainly the Addington cabinet that took office some weeks later had
1 Correspondance de Napoleon Ier, 32 Volumes (Paris, 1858-70), vol. vu, No. 6019.
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less ability and less resolution. To Lord Hawkesbury, who succeeded
Lord Grenville at the foreign office, fell the arduous task of matching
wits with the first consul. A preliminary convention (i October 1801)
provided that all colonies captured by the British (except Trinidad,
wrested from Spain, and Ceylon, taken from the Dutch) would be
restored. Malta was to be evacuated.
The definitive treaty of Amiens (27 March 1802) was negotiated by
Joseph Bonaparte and the Marquis Cornwallis. It confirmed the pre-
liminaries, stipulating further that the British would withdraw from
Malta within three months after ratification and the island would be
restored to the Knights of Malta under a guarantee of all the great
powers. The rights and territories of the Ottoman Empire and of
Portugal were to be respected save that France kept Portuguese Guiana.
Prisoners of war were to be exchanged and there was henceforth to be
peace and friendship between Great Britain and the French Republic.
In reality the Peace of Amiens could hardly be considered more than
a truce for it omitted the most critical questions that divided Britain and
France. While admitting the right of the British to concern themselves
with the affairs of some maritime states (Spain, Portugal, the Batavian
Republic) Bonaparte refused to discuss with them the fate of the
Belgian Provinces, Savoy, or Switzerland. In both London and Paris
the prospect of peace after a decade of conflict excited joyful popular
demonstrations, but in Britain the enthusiasm cooled rapidly. When the
terms of the definitive treaty became known in the spring of 1802 the
comments, in Parliament and out, held a note of scepticism and dis-
appointment that boded ill for the duration of the peace. Three develop-
ments that gathered momentum during 1802 hardened the British
determination to resume hostilities.
One consequence of the peace that shocked and sobered British
opinion was the revelation of Bonaparte’s colonial ambitions. With
Louisiana to control the mouth of the Mississippi and French Guiana
expanded to the mouth of the Amazon, he could control the two greatest
rivers of the Americas and held the potential bases for a Caribbean
empire. France had obtained the Spanish half of Haiti in 1795, re-
gained Louisiana in 1800, and Tobago at Amiens. In November 1801,
taking prompt advantage of the maritime truce, Bonaparte dispatched
an expedition under General Leclerc to suppress the Negro insur-
rection in Haiti. Leclerc and most of his troops succumbed to yellow
fever, and the ill-success of the Haitian project cooled Bonaparte’s
interest in New World conquests. But he pressed other ventures
equally alarming to the British government. The recovery of the French
posts in India provided him with an excuse to send troops and ships
there, and the force that sailed appeared more formidable than the cir-
cumstances warranted. In April 1802, a French expedition explored the
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southern coast of Australia, claiming it as Terre Napoleon. At the same
time Bonaparte indicated that he had not abandoned his interest in the
Ottoman Empire. He dispatched an able and observant officer,
Francois Sebastiani, to promote trade while surveying the local defences
from Tripoli to Syria. General Brune, appointed French ambassador at
Constantinople, received instructions (18 October 1802) to reassert by
every means the leading position France had maintained at that capital
since the sixteenth century.
For British manufacturers and merchants the suspension of hostilities
provided more grievances than it alleviated. Their hope that peace
would bring a renewal of the commercial treaty of 1786 was unrealistic
— this Eden Treaty had been favourable to Britain but injurious to
French industrialists. The fact that Bonaparte declined to discuss trade
relations in the treaty should have modified British optimism. Yet even a
statesman as well-informed as the Earl of Minto ventured to predict
that ‘Our commerce will penetrate deep into France itself and flourish
at Paris’. 1 Instead of expanding with the return of peace, however,
British foreign trade declined. During eight years of conflict, from
1792 to 1800, its value almost doubled; but when peace ended the naval
blockade the ships of France and her client states renewed contacts with
their restored colonies. That Bonaparte should seek to protect French
manufacturers from the competition of the more advanced British
factories was understandable, but it exasperated the British to find that
high tariffs virtually excluded their wares from Holland, Spain and Italy
also. By 1801, the last year of war, the total tonnage of ships leaving
the United Kingdom had reached nearly two million tons. In 1802, the
first year of peace, the total declined, and in 1803 it declined again.
The disappointment felt in British business circles sharpened to
apprehension as Bonaparte made it clear that the general peace would
bring, not a cessation, but an acceleration of French expansion in
Europe. In Talleyrand’s judgment, Bonaparte’s moves after Amiens
revealed for the first time an immoderation that increased with each of
his subsequent successes. Even before the treaty was signed he
‘accepted’ the post of President of the Italian Republic (26 January
1802). Before the end of the year he annexed Piedmont to France and
re-occupied Switzerland with his troops. 2 Following a secret understand-
ing with Russia (10 October 1801) he encouraged a radical reassignment
of German territories. The nominal excuse was the need to com-
pensate with lands beyond the Rhine some of the German princes dis-
possessed by the French acquisition of the left bank. The principal
beneficiaries were Prussia and such secondary German states as Bavaria,
Baden, Wiirttemberg, and Hesse-Darmstadt. Over one hundred lesser
1 Life and Letters of Lord Minto, vol. m, p. 209.
2 See note on p. 274.
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units, including forty-five free cities and all but one of the ecclesiastical
territories, were absorbed by more powerful neighbours. Repre-
sentatives of the German states, meeting in the Diet of Ratisbon,
accepted the changes, and Austria, yielding under pressure, granted its
consent (26 December 1802).
The mounting dissatisfaction in London, and the chagrin and
humiliation felt at Vienna, strained the newly established peace, but
Bonaparte saw no reason to check his course. His achievement of a
successful peace, and his conclusion of a Concordat with the Papacy
(promulgated on Easter Day, 18 April 1802), had raised his popularity
in France to a new peak. A second plebiscite (2 August 1802) made
him consul for life; a third, two years later, was to make him emperor.
Such success might well have corrupted the sanest of mortals. It helps
to account for his peremptory attitude in 1803 and 1804, which hastened
the collapse of the precarious peace.
Malicious and scandalous attacks by the British press on Bonaparte
and his family provoked his ire, and the frosty reserve of Lord Whit-
worth, British ambassador to France, did little to soothe it. When
Whitworth protested against the continued expansion of the French
frontiers, Bonaparte dismissed Piedmont and Switzerland as ‘ bagatelles' .
The British, he pointed out, had violated the treaty by refusing to
evacuate Malta and Alexandria as stipulated. At a diplomatic reception,
13 March 1803, he upbraided Whitworth violently, declaring that the
English wanted war; and on 2 May Whitworth asked for his passports.
Despite the efforts of Talleyrand and Joseph Bonaparte, who sought to
prolong the negotiations, Whitworth left Paris ten days later and
crossed the Channel on 17 May. The following day the British govern-
ment issued a declaration of war. It is still a matter of debate whether
Bonaparte or the Addington cabinet should bear the heavier responsi-
bility for the rupture.
If the British had delayed another year or longer they would almost
certainly have been forced to resume hostilities under graver handi-
caps. With the Netherlands, Spain and northern Italy subordinate to
his wishes, Bonaparte planned to raise his naval forces to equality with
those of England. Whether a prolongation of the peace would have
enabled him to do so is questionable, but it seems clear that the re-
sumption of war came sooner than he anticipated. On 6 March 1803
he allowed an expedition under General Decaen to sail for India from
Brest, with instructions that did not seriously envisage renewed
hostilities before September 1804. Ten days later a swift ship followed
to warn Decaen to seek Mauritius instead. The precipitate sale of
Louisiana to the United States suggested a similar unanticipated urgency,
for the negotiations were completed in three weeks (12 April-2 May
1803). Whatever hopes Bonaparte may have nursed that he might
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come in time to match the British at sea, he could not ignore the fact
that they held a two-to-one superiority in 1803, and this sufficed to
strangle his colonial projects. Thenceforth, Bonaparte’s sphere of
operations was restricted to Europe, a limitation of portentous signi-
ficance for world history. ‘Viewed from the standpoint of racial
expansion,’ John Holland Rose concluded, ‘the renewal of war in 1803
is the greatest event of the century.’ 1
The conclusion that British recalcitrance disrupted Bonaparte’s plans
is strengthened by the fury of his retaliation. On 22 May he ordered
that all Englishmen between eighteen and sixty found in France should
be arrested as prisoners of war. This savage reprisal against civilians
flouted accepted practice, the more so as the British ambassadors to
Turkey and Denmark were among the unfortunate victims. The arrest
of Sir George Rumbold at Hamburg further violated the principle of
diplomatic immunity and roused even the hesitant Frederick William
III of Prussia to forward a vigorous protest to Paris. The increasing
bitterness of Anglo-French relations was also advertised by the treat-
ment accorded to the British scientist and explorer, Matthew Flinders,
when (unaware the peace had ended) he put in at Mauritius late in 1803.
Four years earlier, in the midst of hostilities, the British had permitted
and even aided a French scientific expedition to the south Pacific, but
Flinders’ passport from the French government was disregarded by the
authorities at Mauritius, who impounded his records and detained him
for seven years.
The arrest and execution of the Due d’Enghien in March 1804 so
far overshadowed all other examples of Bonaparte’s ruthlessness that
it merits more detailed consideration. Fear of royalist conspiracies had
become a mania in France at the height of the Revolution; the death
penalty was invoked against emigres who returned secretly and even
against those who sheltered them. Under the Consulate several
royalist plots were formed to do away with Bonaparte. One of them
failed by the narrowest margin when an ‘infernal machine’ exploded
as his carriage passed (24 December 1800). Although the outrage was
promptly blamed on Jacobin terrorists and many were seized and
deported, further investigation traced it to royalist agents. The renewal
of war in 1803 inspired fresh conspiracies in which royalist and Jacobin
plotters joined forces and subordinate officials of the British govern-
ment aided them. These machinations, reported to Bonaparte by his
secret police, must be taken into account in judging the d’Enghien
affair. By the close of 1803 he had conclusive evidence that British
diplomatic representatives, including the envoys to Bavaria and
Wiirttemberg, were involved in a far-ranging plot to overthrow him.
1 J. Holland Rose, The Life of Napoleon I, 6th Edn. (London, 1913;, vol. 1, p. 429.
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Between January and March 1804, leading conspirators were rounded
up. The republican general, Charles Pichegru, had returned to France
secretly in August 1803, and tried to enlist Moreau in the plot: both were
arrested in February 1804. The redoubtable Breton, Georges Cadoudal,
was discovered and overpowered early in March. But a major figure
apparently remained to be apprehended, for some of the prisoners
asserted that a French prince was to arrive at an opportune moment and
join them. At first the police surmised, erroneously, that they might
expect the Comte d’ Artois; then misleading reports from French agents
on the Rhine focused Bonaparte’s attention on the Due d’Enghien.
This young relative of the Bourbons was living quietly at Ettenheim in
Baden.
In the night of 15 March 1804 French soldiers and gendarmes
crossed into Baden, surrounded d’Enghien’s residence, and carried hi m
back to France. No evidence could be found to associate him with the
plot, with which he had no connection. Nevertheless, Bonaparte had
him brought before a specially convoked military court at Vincennes.
He was convicted on the charge of being an emigre who had borne arms
against France, and was shot (21 March 1804).
At most European courts the news of d’Enghien’s death excited
expressions of horror but no positive reactions. His arrest on neutral
territory, the rapidity and secrecy of the trial, and the hasty execution,
left no doubt that Bonaparte had resorted to a deliberate act of terror
and reprisal to check further plots and intimidate the Bourbons and
their adherents. He had also climbed the final steps to a throne. Two
months later (18 May 1804) the obsequious Senate offered an imperial
crown to the new Caesar. Georges Cadoudal, about to die, saluted
him. ‘We have done better than we intended,’ the defiant prisoner is
reported to have said. ‘We came to give France a king and we have
given her an emperor.’
The same week in May that Bonaparte assumed the title Napoleon I,
William Pitt returned to power in Britain at the head of a makeshift
cabinet. At once, with Lord Harrowby as foreign secretary, he began
the task of planning a Third Coalition. Unfortunately, the release of
documents in Paris, inculpating British diplomats in the recent plot
against Napoleon, had damaged British prestige; no one believed the
feeble denials the discredited Addington cabinet had offered. Pitt
could draw some comfort, however, from the attitude of Tsar Alexander
— a Russian protest over the d’Enghien affair so angered Napoleon that
he recalled the French ambassador from St Petersburg. Alexander, in
turn, refused to recognise Napoleon’s imperial title, although Prussia
and Austria did so. The tsar distrusted Napoleon’s meddling in the
Levant, and Prince Adam Czartoryski, who directed Russian foreign
policy after January 1804, favoured a new league against France.
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Pitt’s return to office pleased the Russians, and the prompt offer of
British subsidies encouraged negotiations. In November Alexander
dispatched Nicolai Novosiltsev to London with full power to conclude
an alliance, but an agreement was not completed and signed until n
April 1805. Austria, allied with Russia by a secret defensive pact since
the previous November, joined the crystallising coalition and obtained
a British subsidy on 9 August 1805.
The internal defects of the Third Coalition stemmed from the dis-
parate ambitions of the three allies. Prince Czartoryski dreamed of
reuniting his native Poland under Russian protection, while his master
hoped in addition to obtain Constantinople and the Dardanelles.
Austria wanted to reclaim its lost ascendancy in Italian and German
affairs. The British government desired the defeat of France and its
reduction to its former frontiers. Pitt distrusted the protestations of
Alexander and his envoys that Russia sought only to liberate oppressed
nations from Napoleon’s yoke, but he welcomed the opportunity to
deflect French attention by a new war on the continent.
Napoleon, for his part, wished to delay a breach with Austria until
autumn. He still hoped, in the summer of 1805, that his navy could gain
control of the Channel long enough for the divisions stationed at
Boulogne to invade England. In the first week of August he joined
them. But his naval plans miscarried, and before the end of the month
he ordered his waiting forces to the Germanies. On 20 October he
forced an Austrian army to capitulate at Ulm and on 13 November the
French entered Vienna. Ten days earlier the Russian and British
diplomats at Berlin had drawn Frederick William to the side of the
Coalition. The Prussian foreign minister, Count von Haugwitz, carried
an ultimatum to Napoleon at Brunn (28 November) but softened the
terms to an offer of mediation. On 2 December (the anniversary
of his coronation) Napoleon defeated the Austro-Prussian armies at
Austerlitz. When Haugwitz next talked with the emperor of the
French in Vienna (14 December) he offered congratulations. Napoleon
was not deceived, but next day he granted Hanover to Prussia to keep
Prussia and Britain apart (Treaty of Schonbrunn).
Austerlitz did more than keep Prussia neutral : it wrecked the Third
Coalition. The thunderous events that crowded one upon another at
the close of 1805 marked a turning point in the Napoleonic drama.
On 21 October, in his Ninth Bulletin to the Grande Armee, Napoleon
urged the Austrians to cease fighting England’s battles and to co-operate
with him. ‘I want peace on the Continent,’ he insisted. ‘What I desire
is ships, colonies, commerce, and that is as advantageous to you as it
is to us.’ 1 The hope that, with Britain humbled, he could expand
French influence beyond the seas still lured him: he had spent nearly
1 Correspondance de Napoldon ler, vol. xi. No. 9408.
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five hundred million francs on naval construction since 1803. But the
same day that this Ninth Bulletin appeared, Nelson attacked thirty-
three French and Spanish ships off Cape Trafalgar, and sank or
captured twenty-two without losing a single British warship. The battle
of Trafalgar left Napoleon no choice but to confine his energies to
Europe.
The severe terms imposed on Austria at Pressburg (26 December
1805) excluded the Habsburgs from Italy and reduced their influence
and territories in the Germanies. Francis II agreed to recognise
Napoleon as head of an Italian kingdom and to admit the Electors of
Bavaria and Wurttemberg to the rank of kings. Austria also had to
pay an indemnity of forty million gold francs, but as a small com-
pensation Napoleon permitted it to incorporate Salzburg and Berchtes-
gaden.
The reconstruction of the Germanies, in progress since the changes
of 1802-3, received a vigorous impulsion in 1805-6. Bavaria, Wiirttem-
berg and Baden became sovereign states allied with France. Together
with a dozen lesser German states, they renounced all ties that had
bound them to the House of Habsburg and the Holy Roman Empire,
and were organised as the Confederation of the Rhine with Napoleon
as Protector (12 July 1806). Many minor principalities and knightly
domains, enclaves within the area of the Confederation, were absorbed by
the larger states, which pledged themselves in return to support France
with 88,000 men in case of war. On Napoleon’s announcement that he
no longer recognised the Holy Roman Empire ( empire germanique),
Francis II resigned an elective title that had become a diplomatic fiction
and styled himself Francis I, Emperor of Austria.
By 1806 Napoleon had secured the ‘natural’ frontiers of France and
the territory beyond them. Spain was his subservient ally. French
influence extended throughout the Italian Peninsula, for Joseph
Bonaparte replaced the Bourbon king Ferdinand IV at Naples in
February of that year. In June Louis Bonaparte became king of the
Dutch Netherlands. The German states bordering the Rhine from
Holland to Switzerland were allied with France and so was Switzerland
itself. The policy of creating a cordon of vassal states beyond the
Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees had been realised in full.
Throughout the summer of 1806 Napoleon negotiated with Britain
and Russia, the two great powers that still refused to recognise his
imperial title or his conquests. Tsar Alexander had withdrawn his forces
to Poland after Austerlitz. In London the death of Pitt in January
1806 led to a reconstructed ministry. Lord Grenville formed a cabinet
with Charles James Fox directing foreign affairs, but Fox was already
ailing and he died in September. Both Britain and Russia rejected
Napoleon’s proposals before the summer ended.
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Meanwhile, at Berlin, Haugwitz as foreign minister negotiated with
France while Prince Hardenberg and the war party sought Russian aid.
Ten years of neutrality (1795-1805) had gained little for Prussia save
Hanover. In August 1806, the court at Berlin learned from its
ambassador at Paris that Napoleon had secretly offered to restore
Hanover to George III. Without waiting for Russian military support
the Prussians dispatched an ultimatum to Napoleon (September 1806)
and he struck back with appalling speed. In the twin battles of Auerstadt
and Jena (14 October) the French won crushing victories. Prussian
resistance collapsed and two weeks later Napoleon was in Berlin.
French historians count the victory over Prussia in 1806 as the defeat
of a fourth coalition. In reality no new coalition had been organised and
in this chapter the term ‘Fourth Coalition’ will be reserved for the
alliances formed in 1813. With Prussia prostrate, Napoleon pushed
across the Vistula to settle with the Russians. A battle fought at Eylau,
near Konigsberg (8 February 1807), proved costly and indecisive. For
the first time he found himself at war without a single great power as
an active or tacit ally. He proposed to the court at Vienna the restora-
tion of Silesia as the price of an Austro-French alliance: the overture
was rejected. Turning to the Prussians he offered to re-establish the
Prussian kingdom in return for co-operation: Frederick William’s reply
was to contract a closer accord with Alexander. When spring came,
Napoleon put his forces in motion and again sought the Russians near
Konigsberg; the battle of Friedland (14 June 1807) was a victory for the
French; and Alexander agreed to a truce. Napoleon decided to see if
he could substitute Russia for Prussia or Austria as his partner in the
controkof Europe.
The Peace of Tilsit changed France and Russia from enemies to
allies and divided Europe between them. Out of deference to the tsar’s
wishes Napoleon allowed Frederick William to remain on the throne of
a reduced Prussian state. In secret provisions Napoleon agreed to help
Russia ‘liberate’ most of European Turkey, while Alexander promised,
if the British refused his mediation, to declare war on them. Sweden,
Denmark and Portugal were to be summoned to follow the same
course. By sealing the entire European coastline to British trade the
prosperity of Britain would be destroyed.
The concept of a continental blockade or ‘Continental System’ to
exclude British trade had been considered earlier. After Tilsit the
possibility that it might succeed lured Napoleon into attempting the
gamble in earnest. Because it failed in its aim and drove him to measures
that hastened his downfall the system has often been described as an
impracticable scheme that demonstrated Napoleon’s ignorance of
economics. On the other hand, Francois Crouzet, in the most recent
and most exhaustive examination of the evidence yet attempted, con-
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eluded that it is an error to insist that the blockade was unworkable.
Its failure resulted, not from a defect in the grand concept itself, but
from the fact that it was never applied long enough and consistently
enough to prove its effectiveness. The resiliency and ingenuity of the
British merchants enabled them to exploit alternative markets overseas,
and unanticipated events in Europe partly reopened the continental
markets at critical intervals so that Britain never suffered the full
penalties of the system for more than two consecutive years. 1
In London the death of Fox brought George Canning into a re-
constructed cabinet as minister for foreign affairs. Learning by mid-
July 1807 that Napoleon and Alexander were discussing an agreement,
Canning acted with ruthless promptitude. The Danish navy, though
small, could help France and Russia to close the Baltic. When the
Danes refused to lease their fleet to Britain, a British naval and military
force invested Copenhagen (16 August) and carried off the Danish war-
ships two weeks later. The Swedes, from fear of Russia, remained in
alliance with the British, and the Russian navy was not strong enough
by itself to close the Baltic Sea. The British continued to obtain
pitch, timber and other naval supplies there, and at need they pm-
chased further stores from the United States. Although Alexander ful-
filled the Tilsit agreement and declared war on Britain (November
1807) he did not press it. The British seized the small Danish island of
Heligoland as a depot and continued to land goods on the Scandinavian
and north German coasts.
At the opposite end of Europe the Iberian Peninsula provided
another long coastline difficult to seal. To bring it under stricter control
Napoleon demanded (July 1807) that Portugal break with Britain:
when the government at Lisbon refused, a French military force
invaded Portugal and the royal family escaped to Brazil. Spain, though
it had been an ally of France for a decade, suffered equally harsh
treatment. Summoning Charles IV and his son Ferdinand to Bayonne,
Napoleon coerced them into an abdication (5 May 1808) and declared
his brother Joseph king of Spain. The Spanish people resisted with
unexpected energy, the British aided them, and from 1808 until his
downfall in 1814 Napoleon found his resources drained by ‘the Spanish
ulcer’.
Hitherto Napoleon had fought governments: after 1807 he found
himself fighting nations. The Prussians and Austrians, their temper
toughened by defeat, began to train for a war of liberation, but as in
1805-6 they failed to concert their efforts. Napoleon did not believe
that either would dare to attack him if Alexander warned them sternly
enough. He sought a conference with the tsar at Erfurt (27 September-
1 Francois Crouzet, L'£conomie britannique et le blocus continental, 1806-1813 , 2 volumes
(Paris, 1958), vol. n, pp. 854-5.
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14 October 1808) but despite cordial expressions of friendship the results
proved inconclusive. Napoleon hastened to Spain to crush the resist-
ance there, but before he could do so events recalled him to Paris in
January. The Austrians were preparing for war and (though Napoleon
could only surmise this) they had a private assurance from Alexander
that he would not intervene. By April 1809, the armies were in contact.
Defeated in Bavaria the Austrians fell back and by 13 May Napoleon
entered Vienna. But the Archduke Charles had learned something
from successive reverses; a costly battle at Aspem placed the French in
jeopardy until Napoleon called up reinforcements. His victory at
Wagram (5 July) ended the conflict. Count Stadion, who had headed
the Austrian ministry since 1805, yielded his place to Mettemich who
conducted the peace negotiations for Austria.
The war in 1809 intensified the spirit of anger and resistance that
Napoleon’s high-handed methods excited among German patriots.
Three years earlier a French military court had condemned to death the
Nuremberg bookseller Palm for distributing anti-French pamphlets.
In 1 809 a Thuringian youth who sought to free Germany by assassinating
Napoleon was executed, and in 1810 the brave Tyrolese leader Andreas
Hofer met the same fate. Napoleon’s demand that Prussia surrender
the Baron vom Stein, its minister of foreign affairs, for conspiring against
France, might have cost Stein his life if he had not escaped to Russia.
This treatment of German patriots as if they committed treason when
they dared to criticise or oppose the emperor of the French made all
thoughtful Germans ponder where their first loyalty lay.
The premature Austrian attempt to lead a war of liberation in 1809
cost Austria heavily. Impatient at Mettemich’s efforts to prolong peace
negotiations, Napoleon hastened a treaty with Francis I at Schon-
brunn (14 October 1809). Francis ceded territory to the Confederation of
the Rhine, to Saxony, and to the Italian kingdom. Russia, which had
taken Finland from Sweden in 1809, also secured part of Austrian
Poland. It is surprising to find Austria, after such humiliating con-
cessions, seeking an alliance with France. Metternich, now Chancellor,
believed that Austria must have time for recovery and reorganisation.
On 9 March 1810 he signed a marriage treaty that betrothed a daughter
of Francis II, the Archduchess Marie Louise, to Napoleon, who had
divorced his first wife Josephine the previous December. A proxy
marriage at Vienna, n March 1810, was confirmed on 1 April after
Marie Louise reached Paris. A son, saluted with the title King of
Rome, was born on 20 April 18 n.
Napoleon’s Austrian marriage did not please the Russians, and the
pro-English faction regained its influence at the tsar’s court after
1810. Alexander was learning as others had done that Napoleon could
be a niggardly and suspicious friend. French arms could be spared to
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assure the Elector of Saxony a royal title and to carve out the Kingdom
of Westphalia for Jerome Bonaparte. But the promised partition of
Turkey did not progress, and the tsar’s relative, the Duke of Oldenburg,
found his domains annexed to France without warning. To check the
smuggling ashore of British goods, Napoleon decided in 1810 to take
possession of the coastline from Holland to the Baltic Sea. Alexander
complained at these violations of the Treaty of Tilsit, but he also evaded
the treaty him self. Though he excluded British merchant ships from
Russian ports, British and colonial cargoes were landed by convoys
flying neutral flags but guarded by British warships. Import duties on
these wares helped the tsar’s finances, and at the close of 1810 he raised
the duty on French goods shipped to Russia overland. These affronts,
coupled with disputes over Poland, and mistrust at St Petersburg when
the French Marshal Bemadotte was no min ated heir to the Swedish
throne, dissolved the Franco-Russian alliance by 1811.
In the opening months of 1812 Napoleon concluded a treaty with
Prussia (24 February) calling for 20,000 men, and with Austria (12
March) calling for 60,000, to fight Russia. By spring he had over
600,000 troops under arms. Alexander, on his part, made swift and
realistic preparations for the approaching con fli ct. On 5 April 1812 he
formed an offensive and defensive alliance with Sweden. On 28 May he
made peace with the Turks. His secret overtures to Frederick William
of Prussia brought him an assurance from the harassed monarch (31
March) that Prussia would not aid Napoleon more than necessity com-
pelled. From Vienna Mettemich sent word (25 April) that the Austrian
forces opposing the Russians would fight only a sham war. In July
Russia made peace and formed an alliance with Britain and also
negotiated an accord with the Spanish insurgents who were harassing
the French in Spain with British aid.
For the British the rapprochement with Russia proved a timely
relief, for poor harvests and the curtailment of their trade with Europe
exposed them to severe economic hardships in 1810 and 1811. In June
1812, the United States added to their difficulties by a declaration of
war. As a neutral nation the Americans had both profited and suffered
from Napoleon’s Continental System and from the British Orders in
Council adopted to cope with it. Events in Europe overshadowed the
Anglo-American war of 1812-14, whose indirectly important results
were not immediately obvious (Chapter XXII, pp. 598, 601, 61 1).
Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, which commenced 24 June 1812, the
capture and burning of Moscow in September, and the disastrous
retreat of the Grand Army in November and December, hastened a
reversal in European alignments. On 30 December 1812 General von
Yorck, commanding the 20,000 Prussians in Napoleon’s service, made
a separate peace with the Russians. A month later Frederick William
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left Berlin (which still supported a French garrison) for Breslau, on the
pretence of raising troops for Napoleon. Instead, he negotiated a con-
vention with Alexander for the immediate co-operation of the Russian
and Prussian armies (Treaty of Kalisch, 28 February 1813). Their
plans at this juncture aimed at confining France to the left bank of the
Rhine. In April, however, Viscount Castlereagh, who had become
British foreign secretary a year earlier, reminded Alexander of Pitt’s
proposal of 1805 that France should be reduced to its pre-revolutionary
frontiers. Britain, already allied with Russia since July 1812, strength-
ened the bond by a further pledge and subsidy of one million pounds,
15 June 1813. At the same time Britain and Prussia became allies, the
Prussians receiving over six hundred thousand pounds for the year 1813.
Britain had already induced Sweden to promise military assistance.
Thus by the summer of 1813 a Fourth Coalition, including Britain,
Russia, Prussia, Sweden, Spain and Portugal had formed against
Napoleon. Austria, however, remained, nominally at least, the ally of
France. Neither Francis nor his chancellor, Metternich, considered
it wise to break the alliance: instead they offered to mediate between
Napoleon and his opponents. In May 1813, Napoleon took the
offensive, defeating the Russians and Prussians at Liitzen in Saxony on
the 2nd and at Bautzen on the 20th. Russia and Prussia appealed to
Austria for aid. In suggesting the contraction of the French Empire to
the frontiers that bounded France in 1789, the Allied statesmen were
naming terms they knew Napoleon would never consider. Metternich,
as mediator, proposed a much more moderate three-point settlement.
The Duchy of Warsaw, created by Napoleon in 1807, and enlarged in
1 809 as the nucleus of a revived Polish state, was to be dissolved. French
territorial annexations in north Germany were to be relinquished and
Illyria transferred to Austria. Such minimum concessions by Napoleon
did not represent the real terms the Austrians hoped to impose and bore
little resemblance to the drastic demands of the Allied Powers.
Napoleon knew this; but the Austrian overtures placed him in a
dile mm a. To reject them would make him appear wholly unreasonable
even to his own subjects. To accept meant that the Allies might in-
crease their demands with each concession he made. Playing for time,
he accepted the armistice of Pleiswitz on 4 June, believing that he could
strengthen his forces faster than his enemies could assemble theirs. In
this he miscalculated. For the Allies knew that when the armistice
expired they would have the Austrian army with them. By the Treaty
of Reichenbach, signed 27 June 1813, Francis I promised to declare
war on France if Napoleon did not accept conditions of peace by
20 July.
Napoleon had lost the diplomatic contest. Metternich realised this
when he visited him in Dresden from 26 to 30 June and persuaded him
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to send delegates to a conference at Prague. The Prague discussions
made no progress although the armistice was extended from 20 July to
10 August. Napoleon rejected the moderate Austrian proposals even
though Metternich warned the French negotiators that, unless a
favourable answer were received by 10 August, Austria would open
hostilities on the 1 ith. If Napoleon had accepted, the Allied statesmen
intended to announce that the proposals were only a preliminary
programme, stiffening their terms in subsequent discussions. Napoleon
may have guessed as much; in any case he withheld his assent. On n
August Austria declared war.
The Allies had not only thrown on the emperor of the French the
onus of rejecting what appeared to be reasonable terms, they had gained
the time to strengthen their forces and concert their military plans.
Nevertheless, when Russian, Austrian and Prussian armies converged
on Napoleon at Dresden he hurled them back (26-27 August). But he
could no longer rely on the loyalty of his German allies in the Con-
federation of the Rhine — on 14 October a contingent of eight thousand
Bavarians deserted his standard. Two days later, at Leipzig, he with-
stood an Allied army that outnumbered his own. Both sides sought
reinforcements; a hundred thousand Russians and Prussians arrived on
the 17th; and on the 18th this ‘Battle of the Nations’ ended in a dis-
astrous French defeat. A remnant of Napoleon’s forces, forty thousand
at most, retreated across the Rhine early in November. Over two
hundred thousand, dead, wounded, or prisoners, remained in the
Germanics.
When Austria entered the war in August 1813, Napoleon, for the
first time, faced a Grand Coalition of four great powers. This time his
enemies exchanged the pledges that Pitt had urged in vain in 1799 and
1805. The Anglo-Russian and Russo-Prussian treaties of Reichenbach,
in force since the previous June, precluded separate negotiations with
Napoleon. A similar provision was included in conventions signed by
Austria at Teplitz with Russia (9 September) and England (9 October).
On 29 January 1814 Castlereagh induced the four allied powers to agree
that France should be reduced to the territorial limi ts it had attained
under the Bourbons. The view, so frequently reiterated by the British
government, that the French ascendancy must be annulled and a
balance of power restored in Europe, became the official policy of the
Grand Coalition.
With Napoleon’s withdrawal across the Rhine at the close of 1813
his allies abandoned him and his empire collapsed. His battered
divisions in Spain were already retreating across the Pyrenees pursued
by the Anglo-Spanish army commanded by Wellington. In Italy
Joachim Murat, whom Napoleon had made king of Naples, was negoti-
ating with the Austrians. By the opening of 1814 the ascendancy in
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Europe that the French had tried for twenty years to achieve and
preserve was at an end, and the principle of equilibrium reasserted itself.
The campaigns and negotiations of 1814 which led to Napoleon’s
abdication, and the peace settlement arranged at the Congress of
Vienna in 1814-15, will therefore be reserved for a later chapter
(Chapter XXIV).
Viewed in historical perspective the temporary expansion of French
influence after 1793, and the creation of the Napoleonic Empire, cannot
fail to appear excessive and anomalous. They contradicted a dominant
political trend that had been shaping European society since the later
Middle Ages, the trend toward a system of individual sovereign terri-
torial states. By the close of the eighteenth century many of the earlier
dynastic kingdoms had developed into organic national realms with
definitive geographical limits. The events of the revolutionary period
hastened this transformation. Where Napoleon could appeal to the
frustrated national consciousness of divided and subjugated peoples,
notably the Italians and the Poles, he found it possible to arouse
enthusiasm and secure recruits. But his efforts to reduce all western
Europe to unity under a Napoleonic dynasty ran counter to the emotions
and aspirations of the leading European nations. There is an element
of historical irony in the fact that his attempt to make France secure by
extending French influence over Germany and Italy contributed to an
opposite result. His policy of encouraging the larger German states to
absorb the smaller and his appeals to Italian patriotism hastened the
evolution and consolidation of Germany and Italy into first class
powers pressing upon the French frontiers. Within fifty years of
Napoleon’s death the relative might of France declined to a level at
which La Grande Nation offered, and could offer, no further threat to
the European equilibrium.
Note on Switzerland
The Helvetic Republic, formed after the French occupation of April 1 798, painfully
survived two momentary withdrawals (1798 and 1802) and a sudden re-occupation
(October 1802), but was dissolved by Napoleon’s Act of Mediation (February 1803).
This re-constituted a less unpopular but still satellite Swiss Confederation, restored
to independence in 1815. (See pp. 256-7, 262, 658.)
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CHAPTER X
THE INTERNAL HISTORY OF FRANCE
DURING THE WARS, 1793-1814
AT Valmy, on 20 September 1792, the first of the many victories of
/A the armies of the Revolution marked for Europe the start of a
1 Atwenty-year war, only interrupted from 1802 to 1804 by two years
of precarious peace. For France, this meant the beginning of a new
regime — the Republic. Democratic at first, then middle-class and, later.
Consular, it finally turned into a military dictatorship which, from 1 804,
adopted the name of Empire. This new regime sprang from the big
social, economic and administrative changes which had occurred since
1789. The democratic republic, in 1793 and 1794, tried to fulfil the
ambitions of the Revolution by combining economic equality with the
equality of civic rights that had been secured in 1789. In so doing, it
was to give the world an example which would inspire future socialism.
But these ideals were to be short-lived. The bourgeois republic, like
the military dictatorship, was to be content with consolidating the
achievements of 1789, now firmly established even against the reaction
of 1814.
No doubt the administrative and social achievement of 1789-92, and
the socialist experiments too, would have taken shape differently if
France had not been in an almost permanent state of war which domin-
ated internal policy during the next twenty-two years. The war, and the
dangers to which France was exposed by repeated defeats during the
first five months of the struggle (April to September 1792), developed
in the people an exalted patriotism along with the fear of enemy
invasion and of seignorial reaction. In the face of danger, the majority
of the bourgeoisie, artisans and peasants united to resist, but the
bourgeoisie had to make temporary concessions to the people’s demands.
Then again, the revolutionaries believed that they could only face the
dangers at home by terrorising their opponents. Thus the war produced
the Terror. The Revolution which, until 1792, had only rarely and
accidentally spilt blood, was now to wallow in it; violence and murder
were to become a method of government.
Violence and terror were advocated by the sans-culottes, not a social
class as such, but a fairly mixed group of workers, humble artisans and
small shop-keepers, only partially educated but ardently patriotic,
quick to react in the most primitive ways. The national danger was
such that the bourgeoisie, though shocked, turned a blind eye in order
to save both France and the Revolution. The bourgeoisie, in power
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since the autumn of 1789, had temporarily to alter its attitude by
admitting that it was necessary, for a while, to sacrifice individual and
economic freedom. It agreed to postpone the liberties of the individual
in order to improve financial and social equality. Thus, the war was to
produce a new regime, ephemeral but inspiring the ideologists of social
equality whose number was to grow in France and Europe. Without
war there would have been no Terror, but without the Terror victory
would not have been possible. And, without victory, a general could
not have changed the republic into a military dictatorship nor created
an empire which extended for a moment over two-thirds of Europe and
left the world a changed place when, in 1814, it finally collapsed.
As the battle of Valmy was ending, the Legislative Assembly was
giving way to a new one called the Convention, named after the North
American assemblies because it was to give the country a new con-
stitution. 1
The Convention was to be chosen, no longer by the votes of property-
owners only, but by nearly universal suffrage. But in the elections, held
at a moment of exceptional tension in Paris, in the provinces and on the
frontiers, those who did not uphold the Revolution abstained from
voting so as to remain unnoticed. Only the most revolutionary fraction
— less than one-tenth — went to the polls. The Convention was drawn
almost entirely from the bourgeoisie — lawyers for the most part — with
only two workmen among its 750 members. It was to remain in being a
little over three years — until 31 October 1795. This period falls into
three clearly marked phases: that of the ‘Girondin Convention’,
ending on 2 June 1793; that of the ‘Revolutionary Government’,
brought to an end by the fall of Robespierre on 27 July 1794; and finally
that of the ‘Thermidorian Reaction’.
The first act of the Convention was to abolish the state of monarchy,
which had been suspended with the arrest of Louis XVI on the demand
of the insurgent Commune of Paris after the storming of the Tuileries
on the morning of 10 August 1792. The middle-class Convention had
some difficulty in asserting itself against the Commune. It had no
intention of redistributing wealth on a large scale, far less of bringing
back the economic controls abolished in 1789. But some of its members,
the Montagnards, considered that, in order to keep the support of the
sans-culottes, who had helped them to victory, they had to make a few
concessions, temporarily at least. Another group, the Girondins, was
linked with the important business men of the capital, chief ports and
big cities. It was suspicious of the sans-culottes, and would not hear of
controls which it regarded as an unacceptable attack upon property.
1 The events of the first months of the Convention (from its meeting on 21 September
1792 to the French declaration of war on England and Holland on 1 February 1793)
are described in vol. vm, ch. xxiv. Only the leading threads are picked up again here.
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Between these two groups lay the majority of deputies, like a plain or
swamp of indecision. There were no ‘parties’ in the modern sense
within the Convention, still less in the country. Nevertheless, all the
members were ardent patriots, determined to repel invasion and to
secure a peace which would henceforth protect the new institutions from
foreign intervention. At first, fortune seemed to smile on them. The
invaders retreated and the revolutionary troops entered Belgium, the
German Rhineland, Savoy and Nice, where votes were taken in
favour of joining France. The Convention agreed and, under Girondin
pressure, even declared that it would grant ‘fraternity and aid to all
nations who wished to regain their freedom . . (19 November 1792).
At the same time the Convention was divided about the fate of Louis
XVI. The Moderates, and many Girondins, would have been content
to keep him in prison until the end of the war; but the Montagnards,
backed by the sans-culottes, were determined to make restoration
impossible by striking at the very principle of monarchy. By a small
majority, Louis was condemned to death as a traitor and guillotined on
21 January 1793. The execution shocked Europe and widened the gap
between the Montagnards, most of whom had voted for death, and the
Girondins who, on the whole, wanted to save the king’s life. More-
over, the king’s fate, and the annexationist policy of the Convention,
caused the war to flare up again. A mighty alliance was formed against
France. In all Europe, only Turkey, Scandinavia and Switzerland
remained at peace with her (Chapter IX, p. 254).
The force built up by this alliance shook the French armies, from
which many of the volunteers, enlisted for only one campaign, had gone
home. Dumouriez, commander-in-chief of the Northern army and
victor of Valmy, was beaten at Neerwinden, in Belgium, on 18 March
1793. He blamed the regime for his defeat, negotiated with the Austrian
general, Coburg, and attempted to march on Paris with his army. But,
as the men refused, he went over to the enemy, taking with him the
Minister of War, Beumonville, and four commissioners who had come
to arrest him. This treason disorganised the national defence and
caused a political crisis, all the greater because the economic situation
had deteriorated during the winter. Through repeated heavy issues, the
assignat had lost more than 50 per cent of its original value and, for
lack of control on the price of grain, the cost of living, as a whole, kept
rising. The Girondins, who had wanted the war in 1792, and the
annexations of 1793, were fiercely opposed to all price controls. And
the fact that the traitor, Dumouriez, was closely associated with them
made them appear even more responsible for the crisis.
As in 1792, the crisis produced another crop of revolutionary in-
stitutions. Once more, there were the comites de surveillance (vigilance
committees) and the bataillons revolutionnaires (irregular forces). The
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Jacobin clubs, where, increasingly, the sans-culottes were replacing
the bourgeoisie, intervened with greater frequency and efficiency in the
political scene. Arrests made without government sanction increased
in number. Lists of suspects were drawn up. In Paris, the Sections,
controlled by the sans-culottes and guided by the Commune, accused the
Girondins of paralysing the Convention, and the government of lead-
ing the Revolution to its downfall. Within the Convention, the struggle
reached its climax when on 31 May the sans-culottes rose, as in August
1792, but this time against the Convention. Armed, they presented their
demands: dismissal of the Girondin leaders; abolition of a twelve-man
committee of enquiry set up on 8 May and conspicuously hostile to the
sans-culottes ; a purge of officials; the creation of a ‘revolutionary
army’; control of the price of bread; a tax on wealth; public assistance
for the old, the sick and the relatives of the ‘defenders of the republic’.
The Convention would not give way until, surrounded on 2 June by
80,000 armed sans-culottes, it was forced, after a final show of resistance,
to yield to their demands. Twenty-nine deputies and two Girondin
ministers were arrested.
But in many departments the Girondins, who held the principal
administrative posts, staged a revolt against the Parisian sans-culottes.
This movement, called ‘ sectional', or federal, was especially strong in
Normandy, the Bordeaux district, Lyons, the Rhone Valley and
Provence. It was all the more serious because it followed a strong
uprising of three months earlier (10 March) in Vendee and the adjoin-
ing departments. The peasants of that region, whose interests were
opposed to those of the bourgeoisie, had risen when the Convention had
decreed a levy of 300,000 more men for the army. At the beginning of
June 1793, there were more than sixty departments opposed to or
openly rebelling against the Montagnard Convention. It was a struggle,
not between two political conceptions, but between two social groups:
the upper-middle class, backed by the royalists and frightened by the
growth of the revolution it had unleashed, and the lower-middle class
which had the support of the sans-culottes and was determined to use
extreme measures to guarantee ‘public safety’ and defeat all enemies of
France, both within and without.
Immediately after 2 June, the victorious Montagnards tried to re-
assure the country and disarm rebellion by voting a constitution which
would show that there was nothing alarming in their tenets. The
Convention had already been discussing the new constitution, but its
drafting had been delayed by the quarrels between the Girondins and
the Montagnards. Once the former were out of the way, the work
was quickly finished. The Constitution of 1793 was infinitely more
democratic than that of 1791. It set up universal franchise for men, and
the referendum; it proclaimed the freedom of nations to be masters of
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their own destiny, and the fraternity of free peoples everywhere. It
declared, in its first clause, that the aim of society was ‘the common
welfare’; it affirmed the right to work, to State assistance and to
education, but, against Robespierre, it maintained the right to property
defined in the Declaration of Rights. Economic freedom was asserted,
but also the right to rebel. The Constitution granted legislative power
to an Assembly elected for one year only, and executive power to a
council of mini sters chosen from outside the Assembly and in effect
subordinate to it. This constitution, having been approved by a
referendum (with 1,800,000 in favour) but judged inapplicable at the
moment, was placed in a cedar- wood ‘ark’ and presented to the
President of the Convention — and there it remained. Nevertheless, it
did play an important part in history. For the first time it officially
presented to the world the problems of social democracy. It became a
guide to social democrats like Babeuf, Buonarroti, and later Louis
Blanc, Barbes and Jaures, all of whom were to sing its praises.
Since the Constitution was now in abeyance, the Convention de-
clared on 10 October that, until the end of the war, the government of
France would remain ‘revolutionary’ — that is, abnormal. This
revolutionary government was set on its feet during the summer by
numerous separate measures, without any overall plan but supported by
the sans-culottes. It was codified, up to a point, by the decree of 14
Frimaire an II (4 December 1793). In effect, the executive powers were
left to two Committees of the Convention, those for Public Safety and
General Security. The former had been started on 1 January 1793
under the name of the Committee for General Defence at the time
when the tension between France and England was mounting. Re-
organised and reduced to nine members after Dumouriez’s treason, it
was charged with advising the government on all subjects except finance
and police. After the removal of the Girondins, the Committee under-
went another reshuffle. It was in July and August 1793, when the
situation at home and abroad was deteriorating and the food shortage
was being seriously felt, that this committee (known also as the Grand
Comite) took shape so as to rule dictatorially for a year and save
France from invasion. It consisted of twelve members who did not,
however, form a harmonious group. There were moderates like
Robert Lindet, Lazare Carnot, Prieur de la Cote d’Or, specialists in
military and economic problems; and, on the ‘left’, Robespierre, Saint-
Just and Couthon in the political field. Jean Bon Saint Andre and
Prieur de la Marne dealt with naval questions. Hand in glove with the
sans-culottes were ‘extremists’ like Billaud-Varenne and Collot
d’Herbois; in the centre, Barere, the eloquent man of compromise;
and, on the right wing, a former member of the Parlement of Paris,
Herault de Sechelles. The Committee for General Security, as old as
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the Convention itself and successor to the Vigilance Committee of the
Legislative, was also, from September 1 793, composed of twelve members
who survived in office for nine months and controlled the political
police. These two committees, responsible to the Convention which
could renew or overthrow them each month, formed a kind of ‘parlia-
mentary’ government which had unrestricted power as long as it held
the assembly’s confidence.
The Committee for Public Safety saw to the prompt execution of
its decisions by means of representants en mission (members of the
Convention sent to the provinces and the armies) and of ‘national
agents’ superimposed by the government upon the local administrative
officials. The revolutionary vigilance committees were legalised and
entrusted locally with watching suspects; but in fact they often exceeded
their powers. The part played by the Jacobin clubs was officially
recognised, as a popular check upon the local authorities. Elections
were deferred, and the task of renewing the administrative councils was
given to the representants en mission aided by the popular clubs. The
‘revolutionary armies’, on the other hand, which had set themselves
up in many departements to arrest suspects, commandeer food and
supply markets, were suppressed as insubordinate. The most rigid
centralisation that France had ever known was replacing the extreme
decentralisation initiated by the Constituent. The first result of these
measures was to check the civil war in which two-thirds of the departe-
ments were threatening to rise against Paris. The federal insurgents of
Normandy were defeated at Pacy-sur-Eure on 13 July. Most of the
departements rallied to the Convention and the revolt was thus confined
to three regions, against which regular forces were sent: Vendee;
Lyon; Provence and the rebel cities of Marseilles and Toulon.
In order to smother the risings and to prevent others, the sans-
culottes, by the demonstrations of 4 and 5 September 1793, forced the
Convention to adopt extreme measures which, together, added up to
the Reign of Terror. As early as March 1793, the sending of ‘suspects’
to prison had begun. The edict of 17 September ordered the arrest of
stated categories of suspects. It is still difficult to know exactly how
many Frenchmen were imprisoned as suspects, estimates varying
between 300,000 and 500,000. To judge them, revolutionary tribunals
were established. Already on 17 August 1792, a first, special tribunal
had been formed in Paris, but the slowness of its methods had provoked
the September massacres and it was suppressed on 29 November.
After Dumouriez’s treason, a revolutionary tribunal was again set up,
divided in September into four sections, of which two worked simul-
taneously. Some tribunals and military courts were organised in
provincial cities. At least 17,000 suspects were condemned to death;
including summary executions and deaths in prison, the number of
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victims amounts to 35,000 or 40,000 — figures as high as those of the
sixteenth century, though hardly comparable with the wholesale
massacres of the twentieth century in Russia, Spain and Germany.
Eighty-nine per cent of the executions took place in the areas of revolt:
in the west, in the Rhone Valley, and on the northern and eastern
frontiers. In six departements there were no death-sentences; in each
of thirty-one others, fewer than ten. The biggest contingents of victims
came from the working men (31 per cent) and the peasants (28 per cent).
Compared with the total number, casualties among the aristocracy and
clergy were few, but high in relation to their number and importance.
The Reign of Terror raged from October 1793 to July 1794. It was
essentially political and repressive and its aim was in no way, as has
sometimes been asserted, to wipe out a social class. In essence it was
a defensive measure designed to protect the country and the Revolution.
The two ‘Committees of Government’, besides having to deal with the
‘enemy within’, also had to repulse foreign armies all along the frontiers,
and to fight on land and sea against the European Coalition. In this
struggle, France was in a position to overcome the unequal odds, pro-
viding she made use of all her man-power. With about 26 million
inhabitants, France was the most highly populated state on the Con-
tinent; indeed, taking area and resources into account, she was over-
crowded. The resulting mass of unemployed was easily absorbed into
the army.
The setting up of the National Guard was the first step towards
conscription. As early as February 1793, the Convention ordered a
levy of 300,000 men which, as we have seen, sparked off the Vendee
rising. Finding this measure inadequate, and under pressure from the
sans-culottes, the Convention declared a ‘general levy’. Unmarried
men from 18 to 25 were required to enlist, while the rest of the popula-
tion was expected to direct its activities to a single end: victory in war.
A massive effort was needed to arm, feed and equip these numbers.
France was the only country on the Continent where industry was
sufficiently developed to provide what was needed quickly. Arms
factories were multiplied, all textile mills were made to work for the
army, and workshops for the manufacture of uniforms and shoes
sprang up everywhere. Deficiencies were made good by requisitioning.
Scientists were called upon to improve equipment and invent new war
machines. The semaphore, invented by Chappe, and the use of balloons,
perfected by Conte, made their first appearance in the field. A year
after the invasion, in the spring of 1794, the Committee of Public
Safety was able to face the enemy on all fronts with superior forces.
Financing such a war would have proved an almost insoluble problem
to the old regime, but now the assignat gave the government almost un-
limited funds: all they had to do was to print banknotes. But this
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produced a problem that was new, or at least unprecedented in scale:
that of inflation, together with its immediate consequence — the high cost
of living. This was the result, not only of easy money but also of the
mobilisation which had taken active men away from the land and
reduced production. It was also linked with a series of bad harvests.
After the famine of 1788-9, the years 1791 to 1793 showed shortages.
The markets were badly stocked for this reason and also because the
peasants would not accept the assignats which were steadily losing
value. Thus the cost of food kept rising and inflation spread to the
prices of all commodities.
In such conditions, it was not surprising that those who suffered felt
that the Revolution had fallen short of its aims — a view held by the
sans-culottes in the cities, particularly in Paris. Their ideas on property
differed greatly from those of the bourgeoisie. Like the peasants, bent
on preserving communal customs, the sans-culottes would have liked
property to be based on personal labour, but limited by the needs of
all. On 2 September 1793, the Paris section demanded that the Con-
vention should ‘fix once and for all the price of vital commodities,
wages, and profits in industry and trade’. They added: ‘Doubtless, the
aristocrats, the royalists, the moderates and the intriguers will say,
“this is interfering with property which must remain sacred and in-
violable” . . . but don’t these scoundrels know that the right of property
extends only to basic necessities?’ In this conception of property within
strict limits, they were opposed to the ideas of the revolutionary
bourgeoisie, indeed of almost all members of the Convention. In short
they wanted equality not only in ‘rights’ but also in wages and in the
distribution of necessities. Their ideal was that of a society consisting
of small independent producers and landowners. Their theory of
government was inclined to be anarchistic. They would have liked to
see it exercised directly by the people debating and voting openly in
primary assemblies. Their main spokesmen were Hebert, Jacques Roux
and a group called les enrages. But these men were not original thinkers,
able to stir the masses; on the contrary, they only appeared, in their
pamphlets and newspapers, as the ‘sonorous echoes’ of the sans-
culottes.
To fight the rising cost of living, the Convention, very much against
its own conviction, had to bring in far more thorough and strict controls
over supplies than any enforced under the old regime. The maximum
general of prices and wages was introduced, under sans-culotte pressure,
on 29 September 1793. The ‘revolutionary armies’ and committees were
to use the Terror as a means of forcing the peasants to supply markets
and to sell within the maximum price. A law of 26 July 1793, which
prescribed the death-penalty for hoarders, was rarely put into opera-
tion; but the mere threat of it, and the activities of the revolutionary
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institutions, were enough to improve supplies to markets and shops.
In Paris and other cities ration cards were issued.
Improving food supplies was only part of the sans-culottes ’ pro-
gramme. They also wanted to reduce inequality by increased taxation
of the wealthy and by sharing out the land. At the same time, some of
them accused even the ‘constitutional’ clergy (as well as the refractory
priests) of moderantisme, thus attacking Christianity itself. As early as
1790 a ‘revolutionary’ cult had developed with civic demonstrations and
anniversary festivals (for instance on 14 July); the sans-culottes were
adding to these a cult of the ‘martyrs of freedom’ and aiming to
‘dechristianise’ the country. Most of the Committee of Public Safety,
including Robespierre himself, were opposed to these tendencies which
might alienate the masses from the Revolution and paralyse the
country’s defence. Although the Committee made the Convention
adopt the revolutionary calendar — perhaps the most anti-Christian
measure of the Revolution — it also gave a free hand to Danton and his
friends, (les indulgents ) to start a reaction. At the same time it placated
the sans-culottes by ordering the distribution to the needy of the
property belonging to suspects recognised as ‘enemies of the republic’
— measures which were difficult to execute and could only bear fruit
over a long period. On one side, the Committee arrested the spokesmen
of the sans-culottes for their violent attacks on its policy and for planning
a new insurrection. On the other side, it arrested Danton and his friends
so as to forestall a peaceful compromise and the restoration of the king.
Summoned before the revolutionary tribunal in quick succession,
Hebert, the enrages and the indulgents were sentenced and executed
(24 March, 5 and 13 April 1794).
For four months, the Committee of Public Safety, led by Robespierre,
was all powerful, but in fact it had lost the support of the people of
Paris by the execution of the sans-culotte leaders. ‘The Revolution is
frozen’, wrote Saint Just. The Committee wanted to achieve the final
victory of the Revolution by using the Terror in the name of ‘virtue’.
To offset the measures against Christianity, and in the hope of rallying
the masses, it tried to implant a deistic religion — the Cult of the Supreme
Being. It also pursued a policy of social security by instituting, with the
Register {grand livre) of National Welfare, unemployment benefit for
the able-bodied poor, home assistance for the sick and relief for the old.
At the same time, the principle of compulsory primary education without
fees was adopted, and slavery in the colonies was abolished. But the
application of these innovations had to be postponed for lack of funds
and the prospect for them in future seemed dubious.
The Terror, the tremendous defence effort and the economic and
social controls produced the anticipated results. At home the revolts
were overcome. Lyons and Marseilles were recaptured on 9 and 25
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October, Toulon on 18 December 1793. The Vendeens were crushed on
23 December, and although the rebellion in the west lingered on with
guerrilla warfare, this chouannerie was more tiresome than dangerous.
In the spring of 1794 the main body of the French troops were able to
face the external enemy. After several local successes in attack, on
25 June they won the resounding victory of Fleurus, thus reopening the
way to Belgium. With the civil war ended and invasion halted, the
Reign of Terror and all its restrictions could no longer be endured.
Yet, precisely at the time of Fleurus, the Terror was intensified. In an
effort at centralisation, most of the revolutionary and military tribunals
in the provinces had been dispensed with, and suspects were tried in
Paris. In face of new ‘aristocratic plots’ (indicated by attempted
murders of some members of the Committee of Public Safety), Robes-
pierre’s law of 10 June changed the procedure of the revolutionary
tribunal, abolishing even the scanty guarantees enjoyed by the accused
and refusing them any defence. The number of executions in Paris
from March 1793 to June 1794 was 1251 ; from 10 June to the fall of the
Committee on 27 July it was 1376. This new Reign of Terror, at a time
when victories seemed to make it less necessary, widened the split
between the Committees of Public Safety and of General Security, and
aggravated the lack of unity between the members of the former. The
effect of victory also loosened the bonds which had for the past year
linked the Jacobin bourgeoisie with the sans-culottes. The liberalism of
the one clashed with the dirigisme of the other. The majority of French-
men turned against the Terror, and against Robespierre who appeared
to be responsible for it. At the same time the sans-culottes were drifting
further from the government which had executed their leaders in March.
They were, moreover, irritated by the limitation of wages which the
Commune of Paris first promulgated on 23 July; this in fact meant a
compulsory drop in real wages, just when in spite of price-regulation the
cost of living was still rising.
The ‘Great Committee of Public Safety’ was overthrown by the
Assembly on 27 July 1794 (9 Thermidor, an II), having lost all support
from the deputies and the populace alike, as a result of an alliance
between the terrorists recalled from the provinces and intimidated by
Robespierre, and the moderate ‘Plain’. After a vain show of resistance,
Robespierre and his associates were ‘outlawed’, arrested and beheaded
the following day. With them disappeared the prospect of an egalitarian
and democratic republic which they had tried to create.
The first consequence of Robespierre’s fall was a quick ending to the
Reign of Terror. The regulation of prices and wages was soon abolished
(December 1794), and the social legislation of the Year II collapsed
after no more than a first attempt to apply it. The surviving Girondins
were recalled to the ‘Thermidorian’ Convention as it was now called.
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For a year the assembly had supported Robespierre from necessity,
because victory was essential to the survival of the principles of 1789;
now the majority returned to its individualistic and liberal ideas. The
Constitution of 1793 was considered too democratic to be enforced.
The revolutionary government was kept in office but in a much more
restrained form. Power was divided between three committees instead
of two: much of the authority of the Committee of Public Safety passed
to the Committee of Legislation. Other revolutionary committees were
reduced in number and scope. Under the influence of the Moderates
(while the Democrats were divided into neo-hebertistes and Jacobins)
and owing to pressure from groups of young rebels, deserters and
released suspects, the Convention gradually moved into a path of
reaction. It obstructed the activities of the popular clubs and societies,
and on 12 November closed the Jacobin club itself in Paris. On 24
December, it abolished the Law of the Maximum and restored economic
freedom. This measure caused a steeper rise in prices, followed by huge
issues of assignats. In May 1795, the assignat lost 68 per cent of its face
value and in July, 97 per cent; what was later called the ‘infernal cycle’
had begun. Investors were ruined, workers reduced to near starvation,
while the nouveaux riches, the merveilleuses and the incroyables ostenta-
tiously wallowed in luxury and abandoned themselves to pleasure. The
plight of the working classes was aggravated by the unemployment that
followed the closing of most arms factories built the preceding year, and
by the rigours of the winter of 1794-5, one of the coldest of the century
(even the rivers were frozen for several weeks).
In March 1795, the people’s despair changed to fury. On 1 April an
unruly mob broke into the Convention and demanded the re-estab-
lishment of the 1793 Constitution and measures to control the food
shortages. The National Guard from the rich quarters had no trouble
in dispersing the demonstrators, twenty Montagnard deputies were
arrested and the militant sans-culottes disarmed. But these measures,
far from quelling, only excited the spirit of insurrection, already endemic
in the poorer quarters of Paris. On 20 May the sans-culottes stormed the
Convention once more and killed a deputy, but failed to impose their
programme. The ‘committees of government’, controlled by the
Moderates, organised a counter-attack. Fourteen more Montagnards
were arrested and, with the help of the army (now first used by the
Revolution against popular demonstrators), the Saint-Antoine district
was made to surrender. Many sans-culottes were arrested, forty were
executed, and the reaction spread through the rest of France: this was
the White Terror. The popular rising was crushed and the bourgeoisie
took the helm. The 1793 Constitution was declared void, and the Con-
vention set out to draft a new one. The Royalists saw in the situation
an opportunity of seizing power; but an attempted landing at Quiberon
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by a corps of Emigres (27 June-21 July) was bloodily repulsed, and a
rising of the Parisian Royalists on 5 October 1795 was crushed by
government troops under the command of the young general Bonaparte,
who had distinguished himself at the siege of Toulon in 1793.
The political vicissitudes should not obscure the work done by the
Thermidorian Convention in the spiritual and intellectual fields. In some
respects, it was a remarkable achievement. To put an end to the
religious crisis begun in 1790, it separated the Church from the State.
This experiment did not eliminate religious conflicts but it was a for-
ward-looking effort which was to last longer than those tried in the
economic and social fields and was to have strong repercussions
throughout the world. Free and compulsory primary education was
not put into practice, but secondary education was rejuvenated by
instituting ‘central schools’ which broke with tradition by putting
science, art and modem languages to the fore. Higher education was
improved by the creation of the Ecole Polytechnique and other founda-
tions (Chapters V, pp. 121-3, and VII, pp 198-200). The intellectuals
were proud of these achievements: France appeared as la Grande
Nation. Victories beyond the frontiers also seemed to justify the title,
and with the return of peace on the Continent in 1795 (Chapter IX,
p. 255) it looked as though the new regime, born of the revolution,
could at last take root and consolidate itself within France.
The outgoing Convention tried to give France a stable political
framework which neither the Constituent in 1791 nor the Convention
itself in 1793 had succeeded in making. It now drew up a new con-
stitution and approved it on 17 August 1795 (an III). This was endorsed
by a referendum (1,000,000 in favour, 5,000 against); most of the
six million voters abstained. The constitution was much less democratic
than that of 1793 or even that of 1791: with a franchise based on a
property qualification, the Directory has been described as a bourgeois
republic. In place of the declaration of the rights of man (1789) stood a
declaration of rights and duties, eliminating one of the most significant
phrases — ‘men are bom free and with equal rights.’ As the deputy
Lanjuinais said in debate: ‘if you say that all men are equal in rights
you incite to revolt against the constitution all whose exercise of civic
rights has been denied or suspended for the safety of all.’ The Thermi-
dorians were content to say, cautiously, that ‘equality consists in having
one law for all ’. The declaration did not mention the rights to education,
work, public assistance or rebellion, which had all been included in 1793 ;
but it retained the definition of the right to property as a man’s ‘right
to enjoy and dispose of his property, income and the fruit of his labour’.
Thus it unambiguously sanctioned economic freedom.
Universal suffrage, introduced with the Republic in 1792, disappeared
in the Republic of 1795. Only Frenchmen who paid direct taxes could
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be called ‘citizens’ and have the right to vote. The franchise may seem
wider than in 1791, when it had depended on paying taxes equal to at
least three days’ work; but it is not certain that there were more voters,
in the country districts anyway, in 1795 than in 1791. The system of
election in two stages was continued; to be nominated an elector at the
second stage, a man had to be over 25 and to own property producing
an income equal to 200 days’ work or to rent land or a house to the
value of 150-200 days’ work, according to the locality. In all, there
were about 30,000 electors who met in electoral assemblies.
Legislative power had been given since 1789 to a single assembly;
now, for the first time in France, there were two: the Council of Five
Hundred (les Cinq-Cents) and the Council of Elders (les Anciens), the
latter consisting of 250 members, married or widowers, all over 40.
No property qualifications were required from the deputies. One-third
of the seats became vacant each year. The executive power was vested
in a Directory of five — hence the name of the regime. The Directors,
elected for five years by the legislative councils (one retiring each year)
had powers much wider than those of the king in 1791. They appointed
the ministers, who were merely their agents. They controlled the civil
service, army, police and foreign affairs. Finance alone was separately
administered by five treasury commissioners, and five from the ex-
chequer ( comptabilite nationale), who were elected in the same manner
as the Directors. The administrative framework created in 1790 was
preserved in the main. The departements were left as they were, but
managed by five elected members who were in turn controlled by a
central commissioner appointed by the Directory — a forerunner of the
prefect of the Empire. The districts of 1790, which had played a great
part in the revolutionary government, were abolished, but each canton
was under a municipal body — an interesting experiment which did not
outlast the Directory. On the other hand, the communes of less than
5,000 inhabitants lost their town council, which was replaced by an
elected municipal agent and his deputy {adjoint). Generally speaking,
centralisation was less strong than in 1792-3, but far stronger than in
1791. In particular, the Directory had power to annul administrative
acts, suspend or dismiss any official and fill his place until the follow-
ing year. The organisation of justice changed little. There was still
one magistrate for each canton, but each departement now had only
one civil tribunal.
The new constitution attempted to reduce the activities of the popular
clubs and societies. Although the press was controlled, and newspapers
could by law be suspended for as much as a year, there was more freedom
under the Directory than under the Convention. Church and State
were separated, but attempts were still being made to establish an
official cult, first the deistic theophilanthropy, then the rationalist
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‘ decadaire ’ cult, both of which were miserable failures. The authors of
the constitution did all they could to prevent a return to the recent
dictatorship of an assembly or committee and to forestall military rule.
They separated the powers of government as much as possible, and pro-
vided for annual vacancies in elected bodies. But there were no safe-
guards against conflicts, always possible, between the executive and the
legislative powers, nor for supporting the government in emergencies,
for instance in time of war. And it was precisely in emergency that the
constitution was to be swept away.
The economic situation had gone from bad to worse. The cost of
living in Paris, taken as ioo in 1790, was said to be over 5000 in
November 1795. The plight of the poorer classes was critical. The
Democrats, whose boldest spokesman was now Babeuf, were trying to
regain the support of the people by criticising the new constitution. In
his periodical Tribun du Peuple Babeuf wrote on 6 November: ‘What,
in general, is a political revolution? What, in particular, is the French
revolution ? An open war between patricians and plebeians, between the
rich and the poor.’ The Royalists also were trying to exploit the situa-
tion. Although the last bands of chouans in the west had been defeated
and their leaders shot, the Royalists had at least 200 deputies in the
councils, and might win over an equal number of uncommitted
Moderates. So, changing tactics, they hoped to gain power either
legally by winning a majority in the legislative body, or else with the
help of a general and his men. They were counting on Pichegru, com-
manding the army of the Rhine and Moselle. The Directory had no
broad political foundations: it could only rely on that part of the well-
to-do bourgeoisie to whom the revolution had brought some position
of consequence or the opportunity to acquire confiscated lands or to
gain a fortune by war-contracts: in short, the honnetes gens or the
notables. The influence which the Directory and the Legislative Councils
could exert on each other was so much limited by the excessive separa-
tion of powers that the Directory took refuge in a series of coups d'etat.
The first took place on 4 September 1797 (1 8 Fructidor, an V) and put an
end to the ‘First Directory’ which, for two years, had tried to govern
France constitutionally.
This ‘First Directory’ was composed of regicide members of the
Convention like Barras, Reubell, La Revelliere-Lepeaux, Carnot,
Letourneur. It first tried to surround itself with sincere republicans,
especially the Jacobins. But Babeuf remained unapproachable. A
warrant having been issued on 5 December 1795 for his arrest, he went
underground and with the Italian Buonarroti and other members of the
Convention he organised a plot intended to replace the Directory by a
communistic regime. In so doing, Babeuf was the first politician of the
Revolution who wanted to change into reality what, so far, had been
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considered a mere philosophical Utopia. Furthermore, he broke away
from insurrectional methods so far used in France by organising a
conspiracy of equality led by a small group of men on whom he thought
he could rely, and who would not divulge the ultimate aims of the con-
spirators.
The economic crisis favoured the propaganda of Babeuf ’s supporters
( Babouvistes ). The assignat, which had dropped to zero, was replaced by
the mandat territorial (a new version of the same thing), which lost
70 per cent of its value soon after the first issue and continued to drop
very quickly. The inevitable return to a metal currency meant a sudden
deflation, disastrous for the poor. Hesitating and internally divided, the
Directory eventually resolved, under pressure from Carnot, to tackle the
Babouvistes. Betrayed by double agents, their leaders were arrested on
10 May 1796. Among those summoned before the High Court, Babeuf
and another were sentenced to death and executed. The Conspiracy of
the Egaux was to have immense repercussions in the nineteenth century.
At the time, it encouraged the Directory to move towards the Moderates.
During the elections of spring 1797 (an V) which affected one third of
the Legislative Councils, the Moderates were markedly successful ; and
Letourneur lost his seat as a Director to Barthelemy, a Moderate and a
negotiator of the treaties of Bale. Since the Babeuf plot, Carnot too
was moving into the same camp. The Councils, where the Moderates
(strongly infiltrated by Royalists) were dominant, wanted an early
peace without further annexations. The Royalists hoped that peace
would favour the early restoration of Louis XVIII, although the con-
stitutional royalists and the believers in absolute monarchy were
divided on the nature of the regime. But the republican Directors were
in conflict with the Councils, and the Directory’s policy was not exactly
aimed at peace. In fact, it was influenced both by the foreign refugees
and ‘patriots’ who wanted to ‘liberate’ their homeland, and by the
military men who wanted war to continue, whether from a desire to
spread republican propaganda or from ambition or cupidity. Out of
the three main French armies, two (those of Italy under Bonaparte and
of Sambre and Meuse led by Jourdan) clamoured for continuing the
war. Only that of the Rhine and Moselle, once led by Pichegru and
now by Moreau, was less committed.
The campaigns of 1796 and 1797 favoured the supporters of the war
and strengthened the Republicans. The resounding victories of the
army of Italy obscured the defeats suffered by the armies in Germany
(Chapter IX, p. 255). Bonaparte emerged as the great conqueror of the
coalition. And, since the taxes he raised in the conquered countries
made it possible to give up paper money and were partly used to balance
the budget, it was becoming more and more difficult for any party, or
even the government, to oppose his political views. But at home the
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financial situation was still unsatisfactory. The sudden deflation caused
by the return of metal coinage was further aggravated by the bumper
harvests of 1796-7. The price of farm produce fell. Doubtless, the
situation for the poor in the cities was improved by this, but the
peasants’ position was worsened, and the yield from taxes was dis-
appointing. The royalists and moderates, who met at the Clichy club —
hence their name Clichyens — took advantage of the situation to force
the repeal of a whole series of laws against the emigres and their rela-
tions and the refractory priests. They thought that the Directors,
among whom they already had two allies, would accept their ideas if
Barras, the fifth director, would join them. If on the other hand, Barras
sided with Reubell and La Revelliere, they were counting on General
Pichegru, who had been elected president of the Council of Five-
Hundred, to stage a coup d'etat. As it happened, Barras had received
from Bonaparte some papers seized in Italy from a Royalist agent, the
Count d’Antraigues. These documents exposed Pichegru’s treason.
Barras joined Reubell and La Revelliere, so that the majority in the
Directory became definitely republican. This majority decided to out-
wit the Clichyens by calling upon the apparently least dangerous general
— Hoche, the new commander of the Sambre and Meuse Army. Under
the pretext of going to the west coast to prepare for an invasion of
Britain, Hoche’s troops were to pass through Paris and arrest the
Clichyen leaders. The Clichyens were eliminated from the Ministry and
Hoche himself became mini ster of war. These preparations were
exposed by their opponents in the Directory who pointed out two
violations of the constitution: the unauthorised entry of the Sambre and
Meuse troops into the rayon constitutionnel (i.e. Paris and its environs)
without the consent of the legislature, and the nomination of Hoche as
a minister while he was under age. The Directory had to withdraw.
The plot had misfired (July 1797).
The royalists and the moderates lost no time in reorganising the
National Guard (weeding out the republicans) and demanding the
closing of the ‘constitutional clubs’ authorised by the Directory. But
they lacked both daring and speed. Pichegru could not bring himself to
act, and once more the Directory forestalled them. Unable to call upon
the sans-culottes suppressed since May 1795, the Directory had no
choice but to approach Bonaparte. Since he had been violently attacked
by the Legislative Councils about his Italian campaign, Bonaparte
had despatched to Paris, through various units of his army, some
addresses fulminating against the Royalists and demanding the elimina-
tion of the Clichyens. One of his subordinates, General Augereau,
conveniently happened to be in Paris together with others on leave
from the Italian army. So the ‘triumvirate’ of Barras, Reubell and La
Revelliere called upon them for help. On the night of 3-4 September
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1797 (17-18 Fructidor, an V) the triumvirate had the Clichyen leaders
and the Director Barthelemy arrested; Carnot was warned and was able
to escape. At a meeting of the Councils (legally convened but with none
present except republicans), the election of 198 deputies was quashed.
Thirty-three of these were sentenced to deportation, together with
twelve other men including Barthelemy. All the ‘reactionary’ laws
passed since the royalist election of the previous spring were repealed
and the former laws against emigres and refractory priests revived. As
the constitution allowed, a new law submitted the press to a year of
police inspection. Neither the constitution nor the institutions were
altered. The Directory, brought up to strength with two republicans,
Francois de Neufchateau and Merlin de Douai, was content merely to
appoint republicans in place of officials suspected of ‘moderate’ views.
But, in fact, the Directory and the Councils were no longer free to act.
They were dependent on the Army of Italy and on their leader,
Bonaparte, who had come to their rescue. Bonaparte at once imposed
his views on foreign policy, in particular the terms of the Peace of
Campo Formio with Austria. Already he would have liked to make
his influence felt at home, but circumstances were not yet in his favour.
The coup d'etat of 18 Fructidor had, in effect, united the Directory,
allowing it to concentrate on the improvement of existing institutions.
In this field it played a useful but little acknowledged part in heralding
the work of the Consulate and Empire. Finance was its first problem.
On 10 September, six days after the coup, Ramel, the finance minister,
proposed a bill for reducing the national debt by means of virtual
bankruptcy; the Directory would thus be able to free itself from the
financial tutelage which bound it to the generals. The law passed on 30
September reduced the debt from 250 to 83 millions (by two-thirds).
A third of each government bond, the tiers consolide, remained inscribed
in the great book of the public debt. The other two-thirds were refunded
by means of bonds which, to a certain extent, could be used as payment
for the purchase of national property. Share-holders were thus partially
robbed, but the country’s finances looked healthier. Revenue was in-
creased by new taxes: a tax on doors and windows was added to the
three direct taxes already brought in by the Constituent. These quatre
vieilles were to be the foundation of the French fiscal system until 1914.
Thanks to an Agency of Direct Taxation made up of civil servants, taxes
were more efficiently collected, the deficit was reduced and the financial
state of the country was better than it had ever been since 1778.
Another important reform concerned recruitment. The Legislative
and the Convention had dealt with it by calling upon volunteers and by
the ‘requisition’ or ‘mass levy’ of the men who at that time (August
1793) were between 18 and 25. But no one had been called up since
then. The law on conscription, proposed by General Jourdan and the
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deputy Delbrel, permanently established compulsory and universal
military service: ‘Every Frenchman is a soldier, and the defence of his
country is his duty.’ At the age of twenty, all citizens had to be
registered — that is to say ‘conscripted’ — on the army recruiting rolls.
In peacetime, the length of service was to be five years ; but it was possible
that the government might not call on all the conscripts, in which case
the selection would be done by drawing lots. Conscription has ever
since remained a basic French institution.
In spite of achieving some important laws, the regime of Fructidor
failed to bring political stability. With the Jacobins apparently in power
again, a violent repression — the terreur directoriale — struck especially
the emigres who had returned (160 of them were shot), and the re-
fractory priests: 263 priests were deported to Guiana whose climate,
which was then a killer, was known as the ‘dry guillotine’. About 1500
others were interned in the islands of Re and Oleron. Yet the Directory
consisted mostly of moderate republicans, who were as much afraid of
the sans-culottes (now called anarchists) as of the Royalists. These
‘anarchists’ seemed the more redoubtable as being in league with the
‘patriots’ in the French occupied countries and in the new sister
republics. So the ‘Second Directory’ soon began treating the Jacobins
as suspects. But the elections of April 1798 (an VI), although carefully
prepared by the government, produced a Jacobin majority. Owing,
however, to schism in many of the electoral assemblies, minority
candidates were also declared elected. It was up to the Legislative
Councils, under a law passed in January 1798, to decide which deputies
should be confirmed. By the law of II May, they rejected 106 of the
newly elected, including 104 Jacobins, or exclusifs, and two Royalists.
Fifty-three candidates from the minority were admitted, but 53 seats
remained vacant. Many judges and other regularly elected officials
were also invalidated. This was called the coup d'etat of 22 Floreal.
Given peace abroad, the Directory could perhaps have relied on the
newly formed majority. But instead of dying out, the war was flaring
up again. Unable to invade England, Bonaparte and Talleyrand in-
duced the Directory to send a military expedition to Egypt. Nearer
home, French armies invaded Italy and Switzerland. France was soon
confronted by a second coalition and, in the spring of 1799 (as six
years earlier) was being attacked on all fronts except the Pyrenees
(Chapter IX, pp. 256-7). French troops had to fall back to the Alps and
the Rhine.
These defeats greatly disturbed the French patriots. The Army put
the blame on the government. So did the Jacobins since the coup of
22 Floreal (May 1798) against them. After the elections of April 1799
(an VII), the Jacobins once more had a majority in the Legislative
Councils; egged on by the generals, they pointed to the Directory as
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responsible for disaster. Early in June 1799, the Council of Five
Hundred requested the Directory to justify its policy and declared that
the election of one of its members a year earlier had been unconstitu-
tional and was therefore void. The Directory did not reply for a
fortnight, and then only evasively. The opposition, led by Napoleon’s
brother, Lucien Bonaparte, pronounced the text unsatisfactory and
secured the resignation of the two Directors considered responsible for
the coup of 22 Floreal. Although the whole procedure was legal, this
was called the coup d'etat of 30 Prairial, an VII (18 June 1799). The
outgoing Directors were replaced by Roger Ducos and General Moulin,
both unobtrusive men and reputedly Jacobins. Together with Barras,
Sieyes and Gohier, they made up the ‘Third Directory’, choosing
ministers with a Jacobin reputation, such as Fouche for the police,
Robert Lindet for finance, Cambaceres for justice, Bernadotte and later
Dubois-Crance for war.
Once again the Jacobins seemed to be in control at home. They
tried to bestir the country by appealing to the ‘public safety’, as in
1 792-3. In departements where there were frequent political riots and
murders, the local authorities were empowered in July to arrest nobles
and the relatives of emigres and suspected culprits as hostages. Further-
more, these hostages were made legally responsible for indemnity due
to the victims and for the rewards granted to the agents of reprisal.
The rich were made to contribute to a graduated loan of one hundred
million, repayable in national lands, in order to provide the necessary
funds for the armies without again resorting to the ill-famed paper
money (August). Measures were taken for the prompt enforcement,
without exemption, of the conscription law. Committees of inquiry
were set up to identify those responsible for military defeats and to
probe into the behaviour of some of the former directors. Control was
lifted from the press and the clubs, and the Jacobins gathered once
more in the Salle du Manege. But these measures for ‘public safety’,
effective for a moment, soon met with strong resistance. The hostages
law was unevenly applied, and the compulsory loan outraged all the
rich bourgeoisie (now the ruling class), which accused the Jacobins of
reviving the schemes of Robespierre and Babeuf for equality of property.
Neither directors nor ministers could afford to lose the support of the
bourgeoisie which had helped them to power, so on 13 August Sieyes
and Fouche decided to close down the Jacobin club. Thus the govern-
ment, having lost the support of the Jacobins, had to gain that of the
army instead.
The coalition had been expecting large-scale risings in the south-west
and west at the beginning of August. Those in the south-west, around
Toulouse, were crushed in mid- August. Those in the west, being badly
co-ordinated, both flared and died in September. At the same time,
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French armies were winning important victories over the Austro-
Russians in Zurich and over the Anglo-Russians to the north of
Amsterdam. These successes gave the Directory a respite. But how
could it survive without military support, having already lost that of the
Jacobins ? And how could it keep within the frame of the Constitution
of 1795? This was constructed for peacetime and made no provision
for exceptional procedures in case of war; it also engendered in-
stability by the yearly re-election of a third of the legislative body,
and incited the executive powers to coups d'etat for long-term political
schemes.
Directly after the coup of 18 Fructidor (September 1797), a number of
politicians and intellectuals had thought of altering the constitution.
But the procedure for constitutional revision required nine years at
least — a delay quite incompatible with the urgency of the moment. It
was therefore necessary to resort to a new coup d'etat — now a familiar
technique to the statesmen of the Directory, who had not only used it
three times in France but were constantly advising the ‘sister republics’
to use it too. There had been repeated coups d'etat in the Cisalpine,
Ligurian, Roman, Batavian and Helvetic republics, most of them
having been carried out by generals — Brune and Joubert amongst
others. The bourgeoisie in power wanted to stabilise the government,
revise the constitution and defeat the counter-revolution by preserving
the ‘conquests of 1789’ without frightening the rest of their class by a
return to the regime of 1792-3; inevitably it had to call upon a general.
‘I am looking for a sword,’ announced the Director Sieyes in the
summer of 1799. It seems that Moreau was envisaged, but his record
was disquieting as an associate of Pichegru, a proved traitor, and his
natural irresolution made him elusive. Joubert was then approached.
He was experienced in coups d'etat, but lacked military prestige. For
an opportunity of gaining it, he was put in command of the Army of
Italy, but was killed during the first battle, at Novi, on 15 August 1799.
There remained only Bernadotte, the Minister of War, but he was
said to be involved with the Jacobins.
A dramatic turn of events now transformed the scene. Bonaparte,
believed to be still in Egypt, landed unexpectedly at Frejus on 9 October
1799. He was welcomed as a saviour. The people of France did not
know of his distant defeats and still pictured him as the wondrous victor
of Italy who had dictated peace to Europe two years ago. They thought
that he would again give France a glorious peace. As for the planned
coup d'etat, what other general could be approached now that Bonaparte
had returned ? Arriving in Paris on 14 October, Bonaparte was immedi-
ately canvassed by Sieyes and his associates, and was easily persuaded.
Sieyes imagined a repetition of the preceding coups : Bonaparte would
quietly retire as soon as the new constitution was in force. Instead,
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Bonaparte saw in their offer the gateway to supreme power such as he
had already held in Italy and Egypt.
The coup was planned early in November. The Council of Ancients,
most of whom were privy to it, was to allege an ‘anarchist plot’ and
decide, as allowed by the constitution, to move the Legislative Councils
from Paris to St Cloud. At the same time, it was to put Bonaparte in
charge of the army of Paris. The first act was performed without
difficulty on 9 November (18 Brumaire); the second nearly failed.
The Councils had to be induced to alter the constitution by infringing the
laws of procedure. A minority of the Ancients protested, and a strong
majority in the Five Hundred showed violent hostility, some deputies
even demanding that Bonaparte should be outlawed. Fortunately for
him, it was his brother Lucien who was presiding in the Assembly. At
the critical moment he suspended the session. Together, they called in
the troops assembled round the Chateau of St Cloud to ‘protect’ the
deputies. The soldiers stormed in among the Five Hundred, while the
deputies escaped out of the windows. At the same time, the Directory
was disrupted by the resignation of Sieyes, Roger Ducos and Barras,
while the other two were kept under close watch by Moreau in the
Luxembourg Palace.
Thus it became necessary to set up a provisional government. The
same day, in the evening, Sieyes and Bonaparte collected a number of
deputies whom they knew to be sympathetic. These decided to entrust the
government to an ‘ executive consular committee ’ made up of two former
directors, Sieyes and Roger Ducos — and Bonaparte. The provisional
‘consulate’ would be responsible for the drafting of a new constitution
with the help of two legislative committees, each composed of twenty-
five deputies, one from the Ancients, the other from the Five Hundred.
In fact, the consulate held complete power, and, contrary to Sieyes’
hopes, Bonaparte immediately assumed the leadership.
The apparently unbroken success which had marked Bonaparte’s
career was the key to the political stability under the Consulate — a
stability which promised to bring back order at home and peace abroad.
Bonaparte was only thirty then. But he was gifted with exceptional
intelligence and a boundless capacity for work. His never satisfied
ambitions carried him relentlessly beyond his set goals. He seemed to
be the very embodiment of the Revolution. But, even more, he was a
man of the eighteenth century — an enlightened despot; perhaps the
most enlightened of despots: a true son of Voltaire. He did not believe
in the sovereignty nor in the will of the people, nor in parliamentary
discussions. But he relied on reasoning more than on reason, on ‘men
of talent’ — especially mathematicians, jurists, statesmen (even the
cynical or the venal) — more than on actual technicians. He believed
that the power of an unshakable and clear-sighted will, backed by
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bayonets, was limitless. He despised and feared crowds, but believed it
possible to mould and direct public opinion as he wished. He has been
described as the most ‘civilian’ of generals, but he remained essentially
and at all times a soldier — neither clothes nor titles could alter that fact.
The dictatorship imposed on France by Bonaparte was a military
one. Its true aspect was at first disguised by the Constitution of the
Year VIII — ‘ short and obscure’, drawn up by Sieyes who had the reputa-
tion of an expert in that field since the States General. For the first time
since 1789, this constitution contained no declaration or guarantee of
the rights of man, no mention of liberty, equality or fraternity. But it
reassured the revolutionaries by expressly stating that the laws against
the emigres and the sale of national lands were irrevocable.
Bonaparte alone, as first consul, was invested with vast legislative and
executive powers. His two colleagues were only supernumeraries with
consultative powers. He alone could initiate laws and nominate
ministers, generals, civil servants, magistrates and members of the
Council of State. In 1799 also, his was the chief influence in the
appointment of members of the three legislative assemblies — the
Conservative Senate, the Legislative Body and the Tribunate. Universal
suffrage was brought back, but steps were taken to render it ineffective.
Sieyes had invented a system of electing ‘notables’ in the proportion
of one-tenth of the electorate. The senate, itself recruited by cooptation,
was to choose the deputies and tribunes from among these notables.
But the system was never applied. In 1802, Bonaparte substituted
electoral colleges composed of wealthy citizens elected for life by
universal suffrage, and themselves electing the candidates for the
assemblies; from these the Senate then made its choice. Of the three
assemblies, the Senate alone had some independence, as its members
were elected for life, and some importance as the guardian of the con-
stitution. But it made little use of its powers, and the senatus-consultes
which it promulgated gave ever greater powers to the first consul. The
Tribunate was to consider the bills proposed by the government. But it
showed some signs of opposition ; its most independent members were
purged as early as 1802, its powers were reduced in 1804, and it was to
disappear in 1807. The Legislative Body was to pass or reject bills,
without debate; but in fact it hardly rejected any.
Like the two previous ones, the constitution was submitted to a
referendum. Undoubtedly, most citizens were then in favour of it,
but it should be noted that the voting lasted a month, that the govern-
ment used every possible means of pressure and that the constitution
was promulgated even before the final results were known. More than
three million approved it, but four million abstained.
Far more important than the Constitution of the Year VIII was
the Consulate’s administrative work, and especially the spirit in which
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it was undertaken. At the top, the Council of State played a decisive
role. A revival of the former King’s Council, it was formed by
Bonaparte from the ‘men of talent’ whom he particularly valued. The
Council had a double task: drafting laws and dealing with administra-
tive disputes. At first, Bonaparte often took part in its sessions and
thereafter kept closely in touch. Local administration was still based
on the departement, but its subdivisions were somewhat altered. The great
innovation was in putting, at the head of the departements and of the
new arrondissements, men nominated by the government and subject to
dismissal. These prefets and sous-prefets revived the traditions of the
old intendants, and administrative centralisation progressed still further.
The prefet was assisted by a conseil de prefecture (an administrative
tribunal) and by a conseil general ; the latter was formed of reliable
men nominated for fifteen years, and did not get in the way. The
sous-prefet had a conseil d'arrondissement which hampered him even less.
In communes with less than 5000 inhabitants, the mayors were nomin-
ated by the prefects, and by the first consul in the rest. The municipal
councils were no more to be feared than those just mentioned. Only in
communes of less than 5000 were the members elected directly, and for
a period of twenty years. The rest were chosen from the candidates
proposed by cantonal assemblies.
The judicial system underwent considerable changes. No longer
elected (except for local justices of the peace), the judges were appointed
by the government but irremovable; thus their independence was
secured and they became the core of the body of magistrates. A
hierarchy of tribunals was restored. Above the courts of first instance
— one for each arrondissement — were twenty-nine Courts of Appeal.
In a way, these revived the old parlements but their duties remained
strictly judicial. For criminal cases, each departement had local courts
of summary jurisdiction and an Assize Court; here, Napoleon sup-
pressed the ‘accusing jury’ but reluctantly kept the jury for verdicts.
The coping stone was the Supreme Court of Appeal ( Cour de Cassation).
Yet there were abnormal features in practice. Under the Consulate and
Empire, the police was all powerful and omnipresent, special tribunals
multiplied, arbitrary arrests were numerous, and internments in state
prisons by administrative action recalled the old lettres de cachet and
the Bastille.
The financial system was improved by creating a large number of
specialist officials, including permanent state-appointed collectors of the
direct taxes which had been inefficiently managed by local authorities.
In obedience to the school of the economistes, the Constituent had
abolished indirect taxes, but they were now revived and consolidated
as the droits reunis. To compete with the British economy, Bonaparte
wanted to give to French currency and credit the standards which they
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lacked. The law of 28 March 1803 settled the monetary charter of
France for 125 years. To match the Bank of England, Bonaparte,
helped by the financial backers of the coup of 18 Brumaire, created the
Banque de France. This did great service by advancing money to the
State in the form of bank-notes and by discounting the bills of the
leading Paris merchants; but the benefits were not felt throughout
France for several decades.
Teaching was transformed into a broad public service and teachers
were grouped into one body, the University. Public assistance also
became a state service, and hospital and charitable institutions were
regulated.
The army, of course, was the favourite of the regime. Broadly
speaking, it remained as the Convention and Directory had shaped it:
recruiting by conscription (but allowing provision of substitutes),
mixing young conscripts with veterans, and offering chances of promo-
tion to the highest ranks. However, Napoleon smoothed the road to
commissions for the bourgeoisie by creating the Ecole speciale
militaire de Saint-Cyr for training infantry officers, while the increas-
ingly militarised Ecole Polytechnique supplied officers for the artillery
and the engineers.
This gigantic administrative reorganisation, involving state appoint-
ment to a large number of well paid posts, gave Bonaparte the open-
ing for a work of reconciliation. The Directory owed its fall partly to
the narrowness of its political foundations. Bonaparte, well aware
of that fact, looked for allies on the Right as well as on the Left,
and his most successful method of winning sympathy was to appoint
men from all sections of the political world to the new posts which were
opening. The assemblies contained some former members from all the
revolutionary ones — though admittedly the tamer men. Similarly
among the prefects : in the first batch were 1 5 constituants, 1 6 legislateurs,
19 conventionnels and 26 former members of the Directory’s Councils.
Some had been terrorists, others belonged to the nobility. Bonaparte
opened wide the door to the emigres, most of whom came home. Only
the irreconcilables — the avowed Royalists and Democrats — were still
harried: at first, it seemed as if there were only a few of them, but as the
regime disclosed its defects, their numbers grew and repression became
heavier.
Bonaparte’s reconciling influence was not seen only in the satisfaction
which he gave to the ambitious. He also wanted to put an end to the
schisms that had been dividing France since 1790 and to give a lasting
mould to the new society that he wished to create. Together with the
army, magistrature, university and administration, the Civil Code and
the Concordat formed the corps intermediates, the ‘mass of granite’,
upon which Bonaparte built his regime.
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Bonaparte, an enlightened despot, thought like Voltaire ‘that the
people needed a religion’. Circumstances happened to be favourable
for an agreement with Rome. While in France, Pope Pius VI had died
at Valence in 1799. His successor, Pius VII, had come to Rome in
June 1800 in time to hear of Bonaparte’s new victories. Negotiations
started in September and ended ten months later with the signing of
a Concordat (Chapter VI, pp. 153-4). Thus the schism was at last
ended which had so deeply split France and poisoned the Revolution
for ten years. The Protestant and Jewish Churches also came
under control. Another ‘mass of granite’ was the Civil Code. Since
Louis XIV, the monarchy had dreamed of submitting all Frenchmen to a
uniform code, and every assembly since 1789 had worked towards it.
But it was Bonaparte who was responsible for the decisive impetus —
the < Code Napoleon ’ was promulgated on 21 March 1804. It enshrined
the great achievements of the Revolution: individual freedom, freedom
of work, freedom of conscience and the secular character of the State.
As for equality, the Code proclaimed all men equal before the law, at the
same time safeguarding acquired wealth: its articles were largely devoted
to defining, preserving and protecting property, especially landed
property. On the other hand, it had little to say about work for wages or
salaries, merely forbidding life contracts. On the pretext of giving free
play to economic ‘laws’, it gave complete freedom to the employers.
It even infringed equality of rights by stating that only the employer’s
testimony should be accepted in wage disputes. The code also ignored
equality when it came to women. Their legal rights were extremely
restricted compared with those of men, though divorce was not
abolished. Finally, slavery was reintroduced in the colonies (which were
then in open rebellion). Like the Concordat, the Civil Code was a
compromise between the old regime and the Revolution. It strength-
ened the latter wherever the rift between it and the former was not too
deep. A difficult task, admittedly, and carried out with surprising
speed.
If these ‘masses of granite’ were to be firmly anchored, peace was in-
dispensable. After great victories in Italy (Marengo, 14 June 1800)
and in Germany (Hohenlinden, 3 December 1800), Bonaparte succeeded
in signing peace treaties with Austria at Luneville in February 1801
and with England at Amiens on 27 March 1802. Thus, for the first time
in ten years, peace reigned in Europe. Bonaparte seemed to have kept
his promise of Brumaire when he declared: ‘Citizens, the Revolution is
now settled in the principles which started it. It is completed.’ Indeed,
with the restoration of order at home and peace abroad, the Revolution
and the old regime seemed to be thoroughly reconciled. Should not the
hero of this prodigious achievement be given a ‘token of national
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gratitude’ ? Spontaneously given, such a token would have been weighty
indeed, but it was Bonaparte himself, with his friends, who instigated a
law for a referendum on the following question: ‘Should Napoleon
Bonaparte become consul for life?’ The plebiscite, held under similar
conditions, gave Bonaparte an even greater majority. This display of
his ambition showed that pacification was only one stage in his designs.
Bonaparte and the British government did not have the same con-
ceptions of peace. To the former, it was a means to make France even
greater through peaceful methods; to the latter, it represented the most
extreme concessions it could afford.
The Peace of Amiens, therefore, rested on a kind of misunderstand-
ing and started off a dangerous economic conflict. As soon as the war
was over, Bonaparte turned to encouraging industry. Cotton was
reviving rapidly; imports of raw cotton had risen from 4,770,000 kg.
in 1789 to 11 millions in 1803-4. Competitive awards were offered for
inventors of new machines. Prefects were called upon to draw up
statistical inventories for their departements. But, in order to protect
this growing industry and to prevent an outflow of gold which could
hamper the new Bank of France, Napoleon, to the great disappoint-
ment of the British, who were hoping for a return to the Eden Treaty of
1786, brought in some extremely high protective tariffs. Thus, a France
which included Belgium and stretched as far as the Rhine closed its
doors to British goods. The Dutch, Swiss and Cisalpine markets were
almost as unapproachable. As England could no longer benefit from
prizes captured at sea, peace had become less profitable for its trade
than war. This economic conflict might not have been sufficient to
provoke war again, had not the British Government been alarmed by
Bonaparte’s expansionist policy, to which there seemed to be no limit
(Chapter IX, pp. 261-3).
The reopening of hostilities against England in May 1803 revived
royalist activities, conspicuously with Cadoudal’s Plot. Bonaparte
decided to reply with a hard blow which would smother any fresh
attempts. The execution of the Due d’Enghien (Chapter IX, pp.
264-5) kindled opposition within the old aristocracy and some of the
bourgeoisie, but served as an excuse to reinvigorate the police. The chief
of police and former terrorist Fouche, hoping to consolidate his grow-
ing influence, began to flatter the master, pointing out that the best way
to discourage future plots would be to change the Consulate for Life
into a hereditary Empire. Assassination could then do nothing to
change the form of government! Inspired by Fouche, the Senate sent an
address to Bonaparte, suggesting a hereditary, but not mentioning an
imperial, title. Bonaparte wanted more. He asked the Senate to make
known its ‘full intentions’. But already the well-tamed Tribunate was
expressing the desire that ‘Bonaparte should be proclaimed hereditary
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Emperor of the French’ (3 May 1804). The people were asked to
express their opinion in a referendum which gave the same result as in
1802. So, once more, the constitution was altered. ‘The government
of the Republic,’ it was stated, ‘is now entrusted to an emperor.
Napoleon Bonaparte, first consul, is Emperor of the French.’
The organisation of the government was scarcely changed. Napoleon’s
powers, however, were strengthened, the three assemblies became even
less independent and the influence of the Council of State was weakened.
Napoleon was quickly heading towards the setting up of a system similar
to that of the old monarchies. First, he wanted to be crowned with
even more ceremony than the Bourbons, by the Pope himself. Pius VII
hesitated, but his anxiety about the still fragile Concordat led him
finally to accept. The ceremony took place in great pomp in Notre-
Dame on 2 December 1804. Like Charlemagne, the emperor took the
crown from the Pope’s hands and hims elf set it on his own head.
The royalists were shocked. As for the republican veterans, they
thought, like General Delmas: ‘What a mummery! Nothing is missing
but the hundred thousand men who sacrificed themselves in order to do
away with all this. . . .’ Henceforth, the Roman eagle adorned the
tricolour flag and figured, with the golden bees, in the arms of the new
dynasty. The decoration of the Legion of Honour, created in 1802, soon
took on the appearance of the old orders of chivalry, in particular that
of the Order of Saint Louis, which the medal resembled in shape and the
ribbon in colour. In 1804 princely titles were revived for Napoleon’s
family, and in 1808 an imperial nobility was created. It included
hereditary grands feudataires (land owners), princes, dukes, counts and
barons. They could create entails for their eldest sons but, unlike the
old nobility, they had no fiscal or judicial privileges. Napoleon tried to
blend the old nobility with the new; but the returned emigres scorned
these sons of peasants, ‘masquerading as lords’ but keeping the
language and manners of their youth.
All this alienated the republicans, without appeasing the royalists as
the emperor hoped. Propaganda, a new weapon borrowed by the
emperor from the Revolution, was elaborated. Censorship of the
periodical press became stricter and the number of newspapers was
reduced. Finally, it was decreed on 3 August 1810 that, except in the
Seine, each departement would be allowed only one periodical. No
political article could be printed unless it was copied from the official
Moniteur. The non-periodical press was also censored. On the other
hand, writers in sympathy with the regime were given generous allow-
ances. All original or personal literary thought was banned. Madame
de Stael was exiled and Chateaubriand and Benjamin Constant were
both harried. Naturally, the theatre was under strict supervision,
companies of players and dramatic performances being subject to a
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kind of military discipline. Imperial propaganda penetrated the arts,
education, and even the Church. Nevertheless, opposition persisted.
State prisons were as full as ever: arrest would follow the slightest dig
against the emperor or the regime. For this bad couplet: ‘ Oui, le Grand
Napoleon est un grand Cameleon . . .’ the poet Desorgues was sent in
1804 to a mental institution. Sometimes, suspects were confined under
police surveillance to particular districts, or to fortresses ; or they might
be forced to join the army, or their sons might be kept as hostages, so
to speak, in lycees or military schools.
This dictatorship allowed Napoleon to fight his wars for eleven years
without having to worry much about French opinion. On the Continent
war was interrupted by truces (some quite long ones), but it never
ceased at sea or in the colonies. War at sea brought the blockade in its
wake. With the ‘Continental Blockade’, started in 1806, Napoleon
endeavoured to close the European markets to Britain. For this purpose
he made France the nucleus of a Grand Empire and the centre of a
‘Continental System’ which attempted to alter the entire European
economy to French advantage.
From 1807, Napoleon thought of himself more as Charlemagne’s
successor than as the heir of the Revolution. He divorced his first wife,
Josephine, as their marriage had been childless. In 1810 he married the
Archduchess Marie-Louise of Austria, and next year the birth of a son
seemed to ensure the future of the Empire.
The Grand Empire was conceived as a kind of federation, ruled by
France, but without any notion of nationality or ‘natural’ frontiers.
France itself included some 130 departments spreading beyond the
Rhine and the Alps. In 1810 Holland was annexed to ensure the pro-
tection of the coast and, for the same reason, the coast of Northern
Germany up to Liibeck was soon to form three new ‘Hanseatic’ de-
partments. In the south, a third of Italy was integrated with the
Empire, and at his birth Napoleon’s son was given the title ‘King of
Rome’. In 1812, Napoleon even made a momentary decision to annex
the whole of Catalonia, to be divided into four departements. Around
the French Empire revolved the vassal states ruled by the emperor’s
relatives. There were his brothers : Jerome, King of Westphalia, Louis,
King of Holland until 1810, and Joseph, King of Spain. Eugene, his
stepson, was Viceroy of Italy, and Murat, his brother-in-law. King of
Naples, while his sister Elisa, wife of the Italian Bacciochi, more
modestly governed Lucca and Piombino. Less closely related to the
emperor’s circle, other territories also were under France’s domina-
tion. There was the Helvetic confederation with Napoleon as its
mediator; west of the Elbe there were the German states grouped in
the Confederation of the Rhine and headed by the former Archbishop
of Mayence, Charles Theodore de Dalberg; to the east, the Saxon
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Duchy of Warsaw came under the Empire’s influence as far as the
Vistula. Prussia, surrounded by French satellite states, was rendered
harmless.
Thus the map of central Europe, which had been so complicated
before 1796, was much simplified. Whatever he may have said later at
St Helena, Napoleon never intended to achieve the unity of Italy or
Germany. Yet, by reducing the number of states, reshaping frontiers
and amalgamating hitherto separated populations, he paved the way in
both cases towards unity — all the more by introducing, together with
new institutions, the revolutionary ideas of national freedom, sovereignty
and independence. On all these countries shaped by his own hand,
Napoleon imposed the main reforms of the Revolution, namely aboli-
tion of internal tolls, suppression of serfdom, more or less complete
destruction of feudalism, abolition of the corporations and of most
privileges, freedom of thought and worship, secularisation of Church
property to help finance the new administrations and, above all, the
application of the Civil Code, the Code Napoleon , which was a kind of
synthesis of all the recent social achievements. These institutions
awakened men’s minds, not inspiring much attachment to the new
master, but encouraging men to reflect on their past and present situa-
tion and on their future. Why could they not, like the French, become
unified and independent? The consequent reaction against Napoleon’s
regime was aggravated by the unavoidable war vexations of taxation,
requisitioning, and billeting of troops, and finally by the economic
decline due to the continental blockade. For the great ports of
Bordeaux, Nantes, Le Havre, Amsterdam, Bremen, Hamburg, Liibeck,
Marseilles, Genoa, Venice and Naples, the blockade meant total ruin.
Even industry gained little from the interruption of British competi-
tion, for Napoleon, whose power was centred in France, favoured
French factories above all and channelled all available raw materials
towards France. The German and Italian textile industries were work-
ing below capacity, wages were cut and there was heavy unemployment.
Both employers and workers in the textile industry, and the traders in
the great ports, began to lead the opposition to the Empire. Only the
steel plants in the Ruhr, and also in Belgium and the Saar (then integral
parts of the Empire) were making progress — because they were con-
tributing to the war effort. As for the ‘substitute industries’ by which
Napoleon hoped to begin replacing colonial products (sugar from
sugar-beet for instance), they were still in their infancy.
Thus we can see that by 1812 the Grand Empire, far from being con-
tent under the emperor’s rule, was an artificial entity, likely to crumble
at the slightest setback to his fortunes. In 1812, although French troops
were occupying three-quarters of Europe, the French language was less
widespread than in 1750. Within the Empire, the coercive measures
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taken by Napoleon to make French compulsory in the newly annexed
departments of Holland, Germany and Italy only gave greater resist-
ing power to the vernaculars. In vassal or allied countries there was no
serious attempt to implant the language, but the presence of French
troops and officials, bringing French expressions with them, also pro-
voked counter-movements for the purification and growth of national
languages. As the French armies moved in, the French language
receded — all the more since German and Italian literature could now
rival the French in masterpieces such as they had lacked sixty years
earlier. These works echoed the new genre of Romanticism which, by
appealing to popular traditions and the glories of the past, brought
into relief peculiar characteristics of each nation and went altogether
counter to the unifying classicism of empires.
Even in France the best literary work either escaped Napoleon’s
ascendancy or was aimed against it. From 1 803 onwards Chateaubriand
was considered as suspect. Madame de Stael, still less in favour, was
sent into exile. In Corinne ou l' I talie and in /’ Allemagne, she stressed the
peculiar characteristics of two nations arbitrarily cut to size by
Napoleon and stifled in their deepest desires. The arts, like literature,
also reacted against official classicism (Chapter VIII. a). David had
become the regime’s artist, but the younger French painters rebelled
against tradition. Abroad, Goya made his protest in his scenes from
the Spanish war; the Italian sculptor Canova, though loaded with
honours by the Bonaparte family, denounced the removal of Italian
works of art to France. Beethoven refused to dedicate his Eroica
symphony to the emperor — a traitor to the republican ideal (Chapter
VIII. B, p. 234). Although France kept the ascendancy in the field of
science (Chapter V), yet even science, in principle less sensitive than
literature or art to political fluctuations, also took on some national
characteristics during the Revolution and Empire: scientists renounced
Latin or French in order to write in their own languages.
Nowhere in those days could be found a sound apologia of the
imperial system. Political and economic thinkers were either advocates
of liberalism like Jean-Baptiste Say, or else partisans of an absolute
monarchy refreshed by a return to its older traditions — admirers of
Burke and of the theorists Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald
(Chapter IV, pp. 105-6). Napoleon’s attempt at unifying Europe
found no more support among the intellectuals than among the
politicians or the people. A united Europe could not be built by one
man’s will, or without the wholehearted support of most of its in-
habitants. The fragile construction of the Grand Empire came too late
— or too early. It was doomed, and it must soon collapse.
It was Napoleon himself who hastened the ruin of the Empire by
undertaking in 1812 a war with Russia, so as to keep her by force within
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the ‘Continental System’. The catastrophe of the Russian campaign of
1812 galvanised resistance against him in Germany and Spain and
throughout the Grand Empire. In the spring of 1813, he won a few
victories in Germany, but after the defeat of Leipzig (16-19 October
1813) the French armies had to fall back on the Rhine. In January 1814,
France was attacked on all fronts. Skilfully, the allies proclaimed that
they were not fighting the French people but only the man who had
refused the conditions offered in the Frankfurt declaration. During the
first three months of 1814, with an army of young conscripts, known as
the ‘ Marie-Louise ' , the emperor accomplished remarkable feats of
strategy, but in vain. He could neither defeat the overwhelming
superiority of the allied forces nor rouse the great majority of French-
men from a state of sullen torpor. The Senate and the Legislative Body,
once so docile, demanded peace and a return to civil and political
freedom.
At last, on 9 March, the Allies signed the general treaty which they
had failed so disastrously to achieve ever since 1793: they agreed not to
negotiate separately but to fight on till they had defeated Napoleon.
Then the Allied commanders concentrated their forces and resolutely
marched on Paris. On 30 March, they were at the gates of the capital
while Napoleon had moved east to attack their rear. Freed from the
fear of the emperor, the authorities hastened to negotiate. The Senate
set up a provisional government presided over by Talleyrand, who pro-
claimed the fall of the emperor and, without consulting the people,
called on Louis XVI’s brother, Louis XVIII, whose only firm supporter
among the Allies was England. Napoleon, hurrying to Fontainebleau,
was forced by his generals to abandon the struggle and to abdicate.
The Allies allowed him to retire to the island of Elba between his native
Corsica and the Italian coast.
The future of France was then settled by the Treaty of Paris. She
retained the boundaries of 1792 to which were added the western part
of Savoy, Mulhouse and Sarrebruck. Of her colonies, she recovered
only Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guiana, the Senegal trading posts and
the island of Bourbon.
France had been pushed back to her 1792 frontiers, but she retained
the essentials of the ‘conquests of the Revolution’, which had been
achieved precisely in 1792: abolition of the feudal system, redistribution
of the land after the sale of clerical and emigres' property, economic
liberalism, secularisation of the civil registers, educational and adminis-
trative reorganisation. All these changes had been consolidated during
the Consulate and Empire, and it was no longer possible for any regime
to establish itself in France without accepting all the economic, social,
administrative, religious and cultural institutions built on the ‘principles
of 1789’. The political regime alone could be changed. But when the
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monarchy, restored in constitutional form in 1814, tried in 1830 to go
back on these fundamentals, the sparks of revolution, still smouldering,
ignited again to destroy it. Eighteen years later, revolution again re-
asserted, but more democratically, the essentials of the conquests of
1789.
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CHAPTER XI
THE NAPOLEONIC ADVENTURE
T he last, but not the least of Napoleon’s victories was won at St
Helena. There he created the Napoleonic legend, and there he
lived long enough to see his own career in perspective, and to re-
interpret it in tune with the forces of liberalism and nationality which
were to shape the Europe of the nineteenth century. Bonapartism was
thus preserved as a living force, and the foundations of the Second
Empire were laid. Though he often complained in exile that his career
should have ended at Moscow, the Hundred Days and the ‘martyrdom’
of St Helena gave it the proportions of Greek tragedy, of hubris
followed by nemesis. Like the music of Mozart’s ‘Don Giovanni’,
(which Napoleon heard shortly before the battle of Jena and, rather
surprisingly, admired) his personality and career combine classical
proportions with a wilder note of romantic, daemonic and unlimited
ambition.
The mists of St Helena and the legend still obscure the figure of
Napoleon. 1 It is the task of this chapter to present him as the product
of his age and also the moulder of it, and to analyse the interaction
between his personality and the forces, moral and material, at work in
Europe.
Napoleon was born at Ajaccio in Corsica in 1769, the year in which
the French occupied the island. His father, Carlo Buonaparte,
abandoned the cause of General Paoli, the patriot leader, and rose to
high office in the French administration. Through the good offices of
the French governor he obtained a place for Napoleon at Brienne, from
which he proceeded to the Ecole Militaire in Paris. Both these royal
schools were exclusive, and required proof of noble descent for entry.
Although Napoleon appeared as a somewhat solitary oddity among
his school fellows, since he clung passionately to the idea that he was an
alien patriot among his French conquerors, his ability in mathematics
was soon noted and, in his leaving examination for the artillery corps, he
was placed forty-second in the national list and commissioned as a
lieutenant. Like the majority of the young officers in the artillery, who
were drawn from the minor noblesse and better educated than the
officers of the line regiments, he greeted the dawn of the Revolution
with enthusiasm. In 1791 he wrote a prize essay which reflects the
spirit of Rousseau. Vriien the Constituent Assembly incorporated
1 Professor P. Geyl’s Napoleon — For and Against (1949) is a penetrating analysis of
French historians of Napoleon. He concludes: ‘The argument goes on.’
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Corsica into France, he sided with the French and Jacobin faction in
Corsican politics, and obtained leave from the Ministry of War to
transfer from the regular army to a Corsican volunteer battalion. His
first experience of war was in a bungled invasion of Sardinia in 1793.
The French Convention then precipitated civil war in Corsica, and the
British occupation of the island, by ordering the arrest of General Paoli.
The Buonaparte family, as leaders of the pro-French party, were forced
into exile at Toulon. It was Napoleon’s luck that he was at hand when
the crisis of the surrender of Toulon to the British fleet gave him
his first great opportunity, and he was brought in to replace the wounded
officer in command of the artillery of the Jacobin army besieging the
port. His plan for attacking the vital point of Fort figuillette was sent
to Paris, and formed the basis of Carnot’s directive. The successful
execution of this plan, and the recapture of Toulon in December 1793,
won for Napoleon promotion to the rank of brigadier-general, and
Augustin Robespierre described him in a letter to his brother Maximilien
as ‘an artillery general of transcendent merit’.
It was again his luck that brought him to Paris during the crisis of
Vendemiaire, after two setbacks which nearly cut short his career.
Owing to his association with Augustin Robespierre, he was arrested,
but cleared after an inquiry, in the proscription which followed the fall
and execution of the Robespierre faction in Thermidor (July) 1794.
Then the government’s suspicions of English influence in Corsica led
them to transfer Corsican officers from the Army of Italy, and Napoleon
was posted to the Vendean front. On arriving in Paris he evaded this
order on the plea of illness, but only a fortnight before the crisis of
Vendemiaire broke out (5 October 1795) he was struck off the generals’
list for refusing to report to the Army of the West. When the Paris
Sections rose against the new government of the Directory, Barras was
given command of the government troops. He had been a deputy on
mission to the south in the Toulon affair, and he now summoned
Napoleon as the artillery expert. So it was that his ‘whiff of grapeshot’
crushed the last threat that Paris was to offer to republican govern-
ments.
As the reward for his services, Napoleon was promoted to the rank of
major-general and given the command of the Army of the Interior.
It has often been alleged that his appointment to command the Army
of Italy in March 1796 was Barras’ wedding-gift to him when he married
Barras’ discarded mistress, Josephine Beauhamais. There is no reason,
however, to disbelieve the statement of La Revelliere, one of the
directors, that it was a unanimous decision of the Directory on strictly
military grounds. Since 1794 Napoleon had been urging on the
government an offensive in Italy, but Carnot did not consider it feasible
until Prussia and Spain dropped out of the war in 1795. When Scherer
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was ordered to take the offensive with the Army of Italy, he proved so
hesitant that the Directory decided to replace him by the man who had
planned and promised a successful offensive strategy.
In one month, by a series of battles round Montenotte and Mondovi,
Napoleon knocked Piedmont out of the war and by the middle of May he
entered Milan, after compelling the Austrians by the battle of Lodi to
retire to the quadrilateral fortresses round Mantua. He recalled at St
Helena that Lodi was a landmark in his career and his outlook. ‘It
was only on the evening after Lodi that I realised that I was a superior
being and conceived the ambition of performing great things, which
hitherto had filled my thoughts only as a fantastic dream.’ At this point
he forced the government of the Directory to climb down, in a tussle
highly significant for the future. The Directory had no intention of
conquering Lombardy; they wished only to exploit it, and exchange it
for the Rhine frontier in a general peace. They now proposed to divide
the command of the Army of Italy : Kellerman was to occupy Lombardy,
and Napoleon was to move south to plunder Rome and Naples. This
order was cancelled in the face of Napoleon’s vigorous protest; already
the prestige of his victories and the money which flowed from them to
Paris gave him the whip hand over the government.
He now wrote to Carnot, ‘Soon it is possible that I shall attack
Mantua. If I capture it, nothing can prevent me penetrating into
Bavaria.’ But the failure of Moreau to take the offensive on the Rhine
allowed the Austrians, with their interior lines of communication, to
counter-attack vigorously over the Brenner Pass, and for the remainder
of the year Napoleon was forced into a defensive strategy. The
Austrians mounted no less than four successive counter-offensives,
which were broken up and defeated, often by the narrowest margins,
in the battles of Castiglione (August), Bassano (September), Areola
(November) and Rivoli (January 1797).
By March 1797 Napoleon had received reinforcements and was able
to advance rapidly towards Vienna by way of Udine. At Leoben,
less than a hundred miles from Vienna, he negotiated preliminaries of a
peace treaty, by which France was to keep Belgium and Lombardy and
Austria was to be compensated with Venetia. The political situation in
Paris favoured his fait accompli. The threat of a moderate and royalist
majority in the Legislature which might make peace with England in
the negotiations at Lille and pave the way for a monarchical restoration
forced the Jacobin directors, Barras and Reubell, to act with Napoleon,
and Augereau was despatched to Paris to carry out the military coup
d'etat of Fructidor against the Legislature (September 1797). Napoleon’s
plans for Italian annexations were thus ratified in the Peace of Campo
Formio (October 1797). By the end of his Italian proconsulate he hardly
troubled to disguise his contempt for the Directory and his ambition
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to seize power in France. He remarked to his entourage, ‘ Do you think
that I triumph in Italy in order to benefit the lawyers of the Directory?’.
With the support of Talleyrand he persuaded the Directory to switch
their plans from an invasion of England to an expedition to Egypt
(Chapter XIX). He condemned the invasion project as impracticable,
and the threat to India offered more brilliant opportunities for imme-
diate and dramatic action. He realised that ‘In Paris nothing is re-
membered for long. If I remain doing nothing for long, I am lost’.
The expedition was on such a scale, including a comprehensive corps
of scientists, that it may be assumed that the object was to found a
permanent colony in Egypt and, if things went well, to use it as a
stepping-stone to the conquest of India, where there was plenty of scope
to stir up trouble for the English. In 1797 Arthur Wellesley had fore-
seen the danger of French contact with the native Princes. ‘They would
shortly discipline their numerous armies in the new order which they
have adopted in Europe, than which nothing can be more formidable to
the small body of fighting men of which the Company’s armies in
general consist.’ In retrospect, Napoleon was fond of remarking that he
‘had missed his destiny’ at the abortive siege of Acre: but at the time
he knew well that the battle of the Nile had cut short any hope of further
progress in the east, and his Syrian expedition was undertaken strictly
as a limited sideshow, to forestall a Turkish attack. Paradoxically the
Battle of the Nile, which sealed the fate of the Egyptian expedition, also
gave Napoleon his opportunity to seize power in France. He was able
to put the blame for the defeat of the Nile on his admirals, and his return
to France was preceded by the news of his brilliant victory over the
Turks at Aboukir. The Battle of the Nile revived the coalition against
France. Turkey, Naples, Prussia and Austria in turn entered the war.
With the defeat of Jourdan on the Rhine at Stockach (March 1799) and
of Joubert at Novi (August 1799), all Italy was lost and France appeared
to be threatened once again with invasion. At the beginning of August
Napoleon received French newspapers which told him of the situation in
Europe, and three weeks later he sailed secretly from Alexandria. The
die was now cast: he saw clearly, not only that the fate of the army in
Egypt depended on victory in Europe, but that the crisis had arrived
which would bring him to supreme power or to the guillotine.
On Napoleon’s arrival in France, Bernadotte as Minister of War
proposed that he should be court-martialled for deserting his army
without orders. But the reaction of public opinion left the government
helpless. On his journey from Frejus to Paris, he was acclaimed as the
one man who could restore victory and peace to the Republic. The
significance of the coup d'etat of Brumaire is analysed in Chapter X,
pp. 294-5 ; clearly, the decisive factor throughout was Napoleon’s hold on
the imagination of the French people, at a moment when they felt them-
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selves threatened by a renewal of Jacobin terror and invasion. Sieyes
and the politicians thought that they could make use of his reputation
and yet control him; in the event it was Napoleon who turned the tables
on the politicians. But the survival of the Consulate and the Napoleonic
dictatorship remained in question until the victory of Marengo, the
peace-treaties of Luneville and Amiens, and at home the Concordat, gave
it overwhelming prestige.
Napoleon’s Italian campaigns of 1796-7 seemed almost miraculous;
twelve victories in a year, announced in bulletins which struck the world
like thunderclaps. It was a revelation of a new kind of blitzkrieg, and it
was natural to ascribe its success to the genius of the commander and
the elan of the revolutionary army. To the military historian it appears as
the culmination of changes in the theory and conditions of war which
had been taking place since the Seven Years’ War. It is clear from his
early military memoranda that Napoleon as a young professional officer
had absorbed the ideas of such military thinkers as Bourcet, Guibert and
du Teil, who formulated the doctrine of a mobile, offensive warfare.
But the realisation of these ideas required a new kind of army, in which
individual initiative would replace mechanical drill and discipline. As
Guibert predicted in 1772: ‘It would be easy to have invincible armies in
a state in which the subjects were citizens.’ By 1796 the Revolution had
created such an army. The wholesale emigration of regular officers in the
Revolution opened the way for vigorous young leaders from the ranks of
the non-commissioned officers, such as Massena and Augereau in the
Army of Italy. The fact that a shortage of professionally trained officers,
capable of commanding above the divisional level, was particularly felt
makes it less difficult to understand how a man with Napoleon’s quali-
fications and background could reach high command at the incredibly
early age of twenty-seven.
In his first campaign, which is the model of all his later campaigns,
Napoleon thus had in his hands the instrument with which the new
theories could be translated into fact. To explore the origins of Napo-
leonic warfare is not, however, to belittle his military genius. His
own comment that ‘everything is in the execution’ says the last word
on the difference between theory and practice in war. An exasperated
French general of the First World War once exclaimed ‘Napoleon was
not a great general — he only had to fight coalitions’. To which Napoleon
could have replied, as he did to one of his ministers ‘It is evident that
you were not at Wagram’, where the Austrians alone were formidable
opponents. Up to 1796 none of the French generals had been able to
exploit the possibilities of offensive warfare on the same scale as Napo-
leon, and no general of his epoch succeeded in doing so.
It is alleged that Napoleon neglected tactical and technical innovation.
It is true that the weapons used in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic
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wars were designed well before 1789. It was not until the third decade
of the nineteenth century that radical changes in design began. This
delay was not due to mere military conservatism; neither the revolu-
tionary government nor Napoleon can be accused of a lack of interest
in science. He was proud of being a member of the Institut, and had
close relations with the leading French scientists, whom he frequently
consulted on technical points. It is true that he dropped the military
observation balloon corps which had first been used at the battle of
Fleurus (1794); but in 1802 he instructed Marmont, his artillery expert,
to redesign the field artillery. Renewal of war cut short this project, but
in any case it could only have been a refinement of Gribeauval’s ex-
cellent designs, already thirty years old. The brake on innovation was,
in fact, the existing state of technology, even in England, where the
technological revolution had progressed most rapidly. On the other
hand, industrial expansion had gone far enough to equip large con-
script armies. Valmy (1792) was the biggest artillery battle yet known,
and France produced 7000 cannon in 1793. Rapid technological
change in the military sphere does not favour the emergence of military
genius, as the First World War showed, and a technologically stable
period put the highest premium on Napoleon’s generalship.
Napoleon seldom interfered in minor battle-tactics, as his job was to
keep general control of the battle. But the extent of his innovation in
army organisation has often been overlooked, and in this respect the
most important development was the expansion of the Imperial Guard.
In August 1810 he sent Bessieres a lengthy memorandum on the
organisation of the Guard, which was to be expanded to 100 battalions,
or a total of 80,000 men. The Guard has sometimes been described as an
expedient to offset the declining quality of Napoleon’s troops of the
line. But in 1810 he could look forward to a considerable breathing-
space, with no great manpower shortage.
The significance of the Imperial Guard was that, unlike the guard
formations of other armies, it was a self-contained force of all arms.
Its superb artillery was commanded by the brilliant Drouot, known as
le sage de la Grande Armee. The fighting morale and esprit de corps
of the Guard were extremely high. But the Guard, which had been care-
fully built up by Napoleon and was regarded as so valuable that he
refused to sacrifice it at Borodino, was almost entirely destroyed in the
snows of the retreat from Moscow. It had to be rebuilt from the barest
cadres for the campaign of 1813. Even so it was the decisive weapon in
the campaigns of 1813, 1814 and 1815. In June 1813 Napoleon wrote
‘In most battles the Guard artillery is the deciding factor since, having
it always at hand, I can take it wherever it is needed’. Reporting the
victory of Montmirail (February 1814) he wrote ‘The Old Guard has
exceeded all that I could expect from an elite corps. It was absolutely
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like the head of Medusa!’ If Napoleon the statesman had not set
Napoleon the general an impossible task, and if the Guard had not lost
most of its veterans in Russia, he might well have remained unbeatable
in the field.
In trying to analyse Napoleonic warfare, Clausewitz recognised that
strategy cannot be reduced to a ‘system’. Reminiscing at St Helena,
Napoleon ridiculed ‘maxims’ of war. ‘Of what use is a maxim which
can never be put into practice and even if put into practice without
understanding would cause the loss of the army?’ It is true that a basic
principle is present in his campaigns from the start — the dispersion of
self-contained units of divisions in order to march, and their con-
centration for fighting. Hence he often writes of ‘re-uniting his forces’.
But the application of this principle is so flexible that no two Napoleonic
campaigns or battles are alike. ‘Set-piece’ battles such as Austerlitz,
Wagram, Borodino, Waterloo were exceptions. Normally the battle
would be engaged in a piece-meal, pell-mell fashion, leaving plenty of
room for the appearance of fresh divisions on the battlefield to turn the
scale. If Austerlitz was Napoleon’s tactical masterpiece, the apogee of
the Napoleonic battle is Ulm, where the capitulation of the Austrian
General Mack with 50,000 men was decided in advance by the strategic
approach. The most that can be said is that Napoleon favoured two
kinds of strategical manoeuvre: first, the flanking threat to the enemy’s
rear and communications, as in the Marengo campaign, Ulm, Jena,
Friedland, Smolensk (where it misfired), Montmirail; and secondly the
attack on the centre of an enemy dispersed on a wide front, so as to
defeat him successively in detail. This is the strategy of his first campaign
in Piedmont, as it is of the last campaign of Waterloo.
The conception of the Waterloo campaign was as brilliant as ever,
but it was ruined by errors in execution. In contrast with 1814, Napoleon
now had a veteran army composed of released prisoners of war. Its
morale was high but brittle; some of the generals were mistrusted
because they had accepted the Bourbon restoration. Confidence was
shaken by the desertion of General Bourmont with his staff on the eve
of the fighting. Napoleon had been unable to persuade Berthier, his
irreplaceable chief of staff, to return : Soult was an inadequate substitute,
and inferior to Davout who had been left in Paris as minister of war.
Ney was distraught by a feeling of guilt after breaking his allegiance to
Louis XVIII and bringing the army over to Napoleon. Grouchy, a
good cavalry commander, had no experience of independent command.
Murat was in disgrace, after his treachery to Napoleon in 1814, which
had ended in the fiasco of his defeat at Tolentino.
At the beginning of June 1815 the allied forces on the Belgian frontier
consisted of some 90,000 Belgians, Dutch, Hanoverians and British under
Wellington, and some 120,000 Prussians under Bliicher. Napoleon’s
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plan was to surprise them while they were dispersed along the frontier.
By 14 June he had concentrated 120,000 men on the frontier at Charleroi
before Wellington and Bliicher were even aware that he was taking the
offensive. He explained to his marshals that he intended to operate
with two wings and a reserve, and to beat the English and Prussians
separately. On the 15th, the French made contact with an isolated
Prussian corps, and Bliicher concentrated 90,000 men at Ligny on the
1 6th. Napoleon ordered Ney to contain the English at Quatre Bras,
and to send every man he could spare for an attack on the Prussian right
flank while he attacked their centre. Napoleon drove back the Prussians,
but the decisive enveloping movement failed because d’Erlon’s corps
received contradictory orders from Napoleon and from Ney, and never
arrived in time on either battle-field.
But for this confusion, Ligny might have been the decisive victory;
and within a few hours Napoleon had lost the strategic initiative. As an
English military historian points out, ‘It was in these twelve hours from
9 p.m. on the 16th to 9 a.m. on the 17th that the campaign was lost.’ 1
Bliicher was able to disengage under cover of night, and took the bold
decision to retire northwards on Wavre, instead of east towards his base.
Overcome by exhaustion and over-confident that the Prussians were
out of action for several days, Napoleon did not decide until noon of the
17th to join Ney and deal with Wellington, and to detach Grouchy with
33,000 men to pursue the Prussians. Ney, left without instructions, had
failed to pin down Wellington at Quatre Bras by vigorous action on the
morning of the 17th, and Napoleon’s pursuit of Wellington, retiring
to the strong defensive position of Mont St Jean, was hampered by
drenching thunderstorms.
On the morning of 18 June Napoleon with 74,000 men faced
Wellington with 67,000 men. The stage was set for a decisive battle, as
Napoleon assumed that the Prussians were out of action or contained
by Grouchy, while Wellington had received news from Bliicher that at
least one Prussian corps would join him by mid-day. Napoleon ignored
the warnings of his generals who had been in Spain that the fire-power
of the British line against massed columns was formidable. Having
decided on a mass frontal attack on the centre, he left the tactical
handling of the battle to Ney, whose desperate courage was not matched
by his skill on this occasion. Drouot, his artillery expert, persuaded him
to delay the start of the battle till noon, to let the ground dry out. At
12.30 a column approaching on his right flank was identified as Prussian.
Napoleon could have broken off the battle at this point, but the cam-
paign would have been lost, and he preferred the chance of smashing
Wellington before the Prussians could intervene.
What had happened to Grouchy? In the order Napoleon dictated at
1 A. F. Becke, Napoleon and Waterloo (London, 1936).
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noon on 17 June, Grouchy was told to proceed to Gembloux, and to
look for the Prussians in the direction of Namur and Liege. At 2 a.m.
on the morning of the 18th Napoleon received a message from Grouchy,
still at Gembloux, that one Prussian corps was at Wavre. Only at
10 a.m. did Soult dictate a message to Grouchy to ‘direct his movements
on Wavre, to draw near us, and establish communications with us’.
Two subsequent messages urging him to hurry did not reach him till
4 p.m. and 7 p.m. By the time he heard the opening guns of Waterloo,
Grouchy correctly judged that it was too late to cross the river Dyle and
march to the sound of the guns. But if he had shown more energy and
appeared in force at Wavre on the morning of the 18th instead of
4 p.m., he might well have deterred or decisively delayed the Prussian
flank march from Wavre. Gneisenau was hesitant in committing the
Prussians to an advance, even though he underestimated Grouchy’s
strength by half.
Grouchy’s failure was due to a combination of his own inadequacy
and Napoleon’s errors; he revealed his character when he defended
himself after the catastrophe by saying that, ‘Inspiration in war is
appropriate only to the commander-in-chief, and his lieutenants must
confine themselves to executing orders.’ He showed no initiative,
authority or energy: he took refuge in a literal obedience to orders, and
the orders he received from Napoleon were lacking in precision, and
too late. Neither took seriously the possibility that Bliicher would
recover from Ligny in time to join Wellington. If Napoleon had done
so, he would have instructed Grouchy on the morning of the 17th to
make for Wavre with all speed and seize the crossings over the Dyle.
In any case, it was contrary to the basic Napoleonic strategy to allow a
detached wing to be out of reach for the decisive battle. Napoleon had
nearly lost the battle of Marengo by taking this risk: and it was only
because he had been delayed by bad roads that Desaix had been able to
rejoin him in time.
Despite this error, everything could still be retrieved by routing
Wellington quickly. The best chance of victory was lost when Ney made
the mistake of first sending in the infantry columns unsupported by
cavalry, and then the cavalry unsupported by infantry. A carefully
combined assault of all arms, after Drouot’s tremendous artillery pre-
paration, would have forced the enemy to form into squares, which
could then have been ripped to pieces with case-shot from the horse-
artillery and divisional artillery. The appearance of the Prussians in
force, which tied up 15,000 of Napoleon’s reserves, and the failure of
the last, diminished assault by the Guard after 7 p.m., finally broke the
French army in panic and rout.
It was thus revealed in his last campaign that Napoleon no longer had
the stamina to resist battle-fatigue in order to keep things moving and
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convey clear-cut decisions. He admitted afterwards, ‘I had no longer
within me the feeling of certain success.’
But while Napoleon’s military genius laid the foundation of his
career, it is clear that from the start he was more than a professional
soldier. At an early age he had learnt to judge and handle men in the
rough school of Corsican politics, and his interests were as much political
and literary as military. No mere general could have mastered the
politicians and established a government of national recovery and re-
conciliation as Napoleon succeeded in doing after Brumaire. He could
fairly claim that ‘it is not as a general that I am governing France; it is
because the nation believes that I possess the civil qualities of a ruler’.
As First Consul he sometimes worked 1 8 hours in the day; it is estimated
that during the fifteen years of his rule he dictated some 80,000 letters
and orders — an average of fifteen a day. Roederer remarked to him that
life in the Tuileries was melancholy. ‘Yes,’ said Napoleon, ‘so is great-
ness. My mistress is power, but it is as an artist that I love power. I
love it as a musician loves his violin.’ He himself once said, ‘What will
they say of me when I am gone? They will say “Ouf”.’ He wrote to
Josephine in March 1807 ‘All my life I have sacrificed everything,
tranquillity, interest, happiness, to my destiny’.
His legendary capacity for work seems to have been due to will-power
and highly-strung nervous vitality rather than an exceptionally strong
physique. In the end he had to pay the price of a premature ageing.
Even before 1805 there were two occasions when he suffered a nervous
crisis which simulated epilepsy. Chaptal noted that ‘after his return
from Moscow those who saw him noticed a great change in his physical
and mental constitution’. It was difficult to recognise in this ageing and
corpulent man, often drowsy, the slim, taut, energetic figure of the
First Consul. At critical moments in the 1812 and 1813 campaigns his
energy and judgment were impaired by bodily ailments.
One of his ministers, Mollien, affirms that ‘in the midst of his camp
and during military operations, he wished not only to govern, but to
administer France by himself, and he succeeded’. His ministers were
allowed no collective responsibility, and their work was co-ordinated
through Maret, the Secretary of State. Only Talleyrand and Fouche
were capable of standing up to him; and, when they lost office, Talley-
rand in 1808 and Fouche in 1810, ChaptaFs comment that Napoleon
wanted ‘only valets, not counsellors’ was confirmed. Even when the
Imperial court outshone the Bourbon court in magnificence and bore-
dom, Napoleon’s private life remained simple, laborious and even
bourgeois. Murat, the dandy, told him that his clothes were un-
fashionable; and his tailor complained that his account was not worth
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much. He would have nothing to do with the formal levees of the
Bourbon court; and neither Josephine nor Marie-Louise nor any of
his mistresses were allowed any political influence. His rough treatment
of Madame de Stael was due to his fear and dislike of her pretentions
as a femme politique. He told Madame de Remusat that ‘he would have
no women ruling at his court; they had injured Henry IV and Louis
XIV’. Napoleon frequently lectured his brothers on the art of ruling.
He told Louis, King of Holland, that ‘a prince who in the first year of
his reign is considered to be kind, is a prince who is mocked at in his
second year’. ‘Abroad and at home I reign only through the fear I
inspire.’ He told Bourrienne, the friend of his youth ‘Friendship is
only a word: I care for nobody’. He confided to Fain, his Secretary,
that his anger was often simulated, in order to inspire fear. ‘Otherwise
they would come and bite me in the hand.’
This image of the inhuman tyrant is far from being the whole truth
about Napoleon. He was by origin and temperament a man of the
Mediterranean, of warm and violent feelings, and vivid imagination;
gregarious, voluble, intensely interested in people and ideas. He knew
how to be fascinating as well as formidable. Caulaincourt, his close
companion for ten years as Master of the Horse and Foreign Minister,
records that ‘the emperor’s feelings were expressed through every pore.
When he chose, nobody could be more fascinating’. His superb intellect
was matched by a striking physical presence, despite his large head and
relatively small stature, no more than five feet six inches. The idealised
portraits of David and the rest of Napoleon’s immense pictorial pro-
paganda-machine may be suspect, but the death-mask of Napoleon
reveals features of classic beauty. Madame de Remusat, a waspish
critic of Napoleon after his fall, describes his appearance: ‘His forehead,
the setting of his eye, the line of his nose are all beautiful, and remind
one of an antique medallion.’
On the military mind, the impact of Napoleon’s personality was
irresistible. He said at St Helena that ‘the most important quality in a
general is to know the character of his soldiers and to gain their con-
fidence’. ‘The military are a Freemasonry, and I am their Grand
Master.’ He played on the emotions of military glory, emulation and
comradeship with unprecedented virtuosity, and not even disaster and
slaughter could break the bond between them. Even in the appalling
retreat from Moscow, there was less grumbling in this army than in
Wellington’s army which was at the same time retreating from Burgos.
Wellington reckoned that the moral effect of Napoleon’s presence with
his army was the equivalent of 40,000 men. This was due not merely to
his professional skill and the prestige of victory. Marmont explains
that it ‘was by familiarities that the emperor made the soldiers adore
him, but it was a means only available to a commander whom frequent
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victories had made illustrious; any other general would have injured
his reputation by it’. Marshal Lannes used to complain that he
‘ought to be pitied for having conceived an unfortunate passion for this
harlot’. When Napoleon boarded the Bellerophon in 1815, fat, middle-
aged and totally defeated, he captivated the officers and men within a
couple of days, to such an extent that the Admiralty were alarmed.
‘Damn the fellow!’ exclaimed Admiral Lord Keith, ‘if he had obtained
an interview with His Royal Highness, in half an hour they would have
been the best friends in England.’
Napoleon’s personality presented a dazzling combination of intelli-
gence and imagination. He was a product of the revolutionary age, a
time when the crust of social custom had been broken, and nothing
seemed impossible of achievement to men with clear minds and strong
wills. He was moulded by the two powerful influences which inspired
the Revolution, the scientific rationalist spirit of the Enlightenment, and
the romantic sensibility of Rousseau. The romanticism of his youthful
writings is soon soured by a colossal egoism: just as the style of his
writing changes from a turgid imitation of Rousseau. But the romantic
element in his character was not extinguished : it was rather transformed
into a romantic ambition — romantic because it was unlimited, feeding
on dreams of a career surpassing anything in history. The carefully
calculated and limited ambition of a Frederick the Great was no longer
enough for Napoleon. He wrote to his brother Joseph in 1804 ‘I
believe I am destined to change the face of the world’. ‘If I had suc-
ceeded, I should have been the greatest man known to history.’ Mole,
who began his career as one of Napoleon’s auditeurs, thought that ‘he
was much less concerned to leave behind him a “race”, a dynasty, than
a name which should have no equal and glory that could not be sur-
passed’. His passion for the poetry of Corneille and the mediocre
Ossian was due to their themes of heroic glory. His prodigious rise had
been due to the exquisite balance between his imagination and his
intelligence. But what would happen if this balance was upset — if the
imagination became uncontrolled and the realistic appraisal of the facts
obscured? Moscow and St Helena, as well as Austerlitz and the
Empire, seem to be implicit in his nature.
His experience of the Revolution had given him a horror of the mob
and of ‘ideology’. It is significant that his confidence and his moral
courage wavered on two occasions — when he was faced with the
hostile assemblies at St Cloud in Brumaire, and with royalist mobs in
Provence on his way to Elba. In the Conseil d' lit at, the main instrument
of government of the Consulate, he aimed to gather the ablest men of all
parties, irrespective of their past. Chaptal said that ‘Bonaparte con-
ceived the idea of uniting and amalgamating everything. He put in the
same committee, side by side, men who had been opposed in character
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and opinions for the last ten years, men who detested each other, men
who had proscribed each other. It was in this way that Bonaparte
assembled all the talents in every sphere and fused all the factions. The
history of the Revolution became as remote for us as that of the Greeks
and Romans’. In 1803 he created the post of auditeurs to the Conseil
d'Etat. These were young men attached to the Ministries and sitting in
on the meetings of the Conseil for training as higher civil servants.
Often they were sent on special missions and reported directly to
Napoleon. By 1813, three hundred auditeurs had been appointed, and
Napoleon gave them every encouragement. He boasted that ‘there is
no conquest which I could not undertake because with the help of my
soldiers and my auditeurs I could conquer and rule the whole world’.
In this bold and imaginative conception Napoleon was at least half a
century ahead of his time. He claimed to have created the ‘most
compact government with the most rapid circulation and the most
energetic movement that ever existed’. ‘I wish to govern men as they
want to be governed.’ In the main institutions of the Consulate — the
Civil Code, the Concordat, the Legion of Honour, the Bank of France
— there was much that was sound and enduring, because they were in
accord with the interests and the aspirations of the dominant classes in
the Revolution, the bourgeoisie and the peasant proprietors.
In spite of his lucid intelligence and his passion for facts, there were
fatal limits to Napoleon’s political insight, and contradictions in his
policy which he was unable to see or unwilling to resolve. He remained
the prisoner of his heredity and his environment. He had finished with
Corsica by 1794, but his relations with his family and his followers show
a persisting Corsican feeling of clan, which seriously hampered his
policy. His reactions in the Enghien affair betray an element of the
Corsican concept of the vendetta. ‘They have not the right to murder
me’ he exclaimed, when he learned of the Comte d’ Artois’ complicity
in the Cadoudal plot. If the Bourbons chose to assassinate him,
despite the fact that he had no part in the execution of Louis XVI, he
had the right to kill a member of the opposing clan. A curious example
of this thinking occurs in his will, when he left a bequest to a man who
had tried to assassinate Wellington, whom Napoleon held responsible
for the execution of Marshal Ney. He was meticulous in remembering
the friends of his youth. Des Mazis, his closest friend as a cadet and
subaltern, was given a palace appointment as Keeper of the Wardrobe,
as soon as he returned from exile as an emigre. Marechal de Segur, the
veteran royalist, who had signed his first commission as Lieutenant, was
received at the Tuileries with the highest honours. His old nurse was
brought from Corsica to be present at his coronation.
Still less was he able to resist the demands of the Bonaparte family,
though it was his Beauhamais relations who gave him the greater
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affection and loyalty. His stepson Eugene Beauharnais was a loyal
and efficient viceroy in Italy: but Napoleon never dared to adopt
him as his heir to the imperial crown, as it would be too great an affront
to his Bonaparte relatives. In 1804 Fouche condemned the ‘revolting
incapacity’ of Napoleon’s brothers; but, if they lacked his ability, they
were liberally endowed with self-will and ambition; and neither they
nor their sisters were overawed by their illustrious brother. Their
grumblings, their sulks and their pretensions so exasperated him that
he complained ‘From the way they talk, one would think that I had
mismanaged our father’s inheritance’. ‘With the Queen of Naples I
have always to fight a pitched battle.’ Yielding to his sense of family
obligation, he committed the political error of organising his Empire by
giving thrones to his relatives. Joseph, first made King of Naples and
then of Spain, Louis, King of Holland, and Jerome, King of Westphalia,
did not merit their promotion. If Napoleon expected them to obey his
orders, he was quickly disillusioned when they expected to be treated
as independent monarchs. Lucien refused to break up his second
marriage, which Napoleon considered to be a mesalliance, and quarrelled
with him after 1802. At the end of 1807 Napoleon hoped to arrange a
marriage-alliance between Charlotte, Lucien’s daughter, and Ferdinand,
heir to the Spanish throne: but Lucien refused to be readmitted to the
imperial family on Napoleon’s terms.
Still more extraordinary was Napoleon’s treatment of Murat and
Bemadotte, who rewarded him with the most cynical treachery. He
knew that Murat, a superb cavalry leader, was politically worthless: but
he was given the throne of Naples, because he was married to Napoleon’s
sister, Caroline. Bernadotte was a political general, who was lucky to
have escaped arrest for treason in 1804. Napoleon wrote of him in 1809
‘Bernadotte is an intriguer whom I cannot trust. He nearly lost me the
battle of Jena, he was mediocre at Wagram, and he did not do what he
might have done at Austerlitz’. Yet Napoleon made him marshal and
prince, and acquiesced in his becoming Crown Prince of Sweden, simply
because his wife Desiree Clary was the girl Napoleon had first thought of
marrying, and was Joseph’s sister-in-law.
Napoleon was a shrewd judge of the qualities of his generals. He
thought that Desaix would have been ‘the first general of France’ if
he had not been killed at Marengo : Lannes might have become so, if he
had not been killed at Essling. Ney and Murat were incomparable
leaders of men on the battlefield but no more. Berthier was a superb
chief of staff, but a muddler if left to himself. Only Massena, Davout,
and possibly Soult were capable of independent command of large
armies. It was, therefore, against his better judgment that he gave
Junot the command of the Army of Portugal in 1808, and appointed
Marmont to command against Wellington in 1811, because they had
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been his friends and aides-de-camp in his youth. It was similarly a costly
mistake to give his brother Jerome command of a corps in the Russian
campaign of 1812: and to leave Murat in command of the Grand Army
in the final stages of the retreat from Moscow, when his nerve had
obviously gone.
Napoleon was successful in keeping his generals out of politics, but
only at the cost of loading them with honours and wealth. The estab-
lishment of an imperial nobility in 1808 with hereditary titles and landed
estates was a flagrant breach of the revolutionary principle of equality.
Napoleon defended it on the ground that ‘I do not hurt the principle of
equality by giving titles to certain men without respect of birth, which is
now an exploded notion’ ; and that it was necessary to efface the prestige
of the noblesse of the old regime. He told Joseph in 1808 that ‘my
intention is to make the generals so rich that I shall never hear of them
dishonouring by cupidity the most noble profession, or attracting the
contempt of the soldier’. But the extravagance which he encouraged
among his marshals was morally corrupting, and in the final debacle
of the Empire, they thought more of preserving their lives and their
fortunes than of fighting to the last gasp for their benefactor. Ironically
it was Lefebvre, the first to be created a hereditary duke by Napoleon,
who blurted out the truth when the marshals forced Napoleon’s
abdication at Fontainebleau in 1814: ‘Did he believe that when we have
titles, honours, and lands, we would kill ourselves for his sake?’.
The ex-Jacobin Thibaudeau warned Napoleon against the attempt to
revive hereditary monarchy: but Napoleon saw no reason why a
‘fourth dynasty of France’ should not be established on the basis of the
social changes brought about by the Revolution. After the coronation
in 1804, and still more after the Austrian marriage and the birth of the
King of Rome, he hoped that his dynasty had acquired the sanction of
legitimacy. Having married a niece of Marie Antoinette, he even took
to the ridiculous habit of referring to Louis XVI as ‘mon oncle’.
He found it difficult to believe, until it was too late, that the Emperor
Francis would join in the destruction of his son-in-law and his grandson.
Henri Beyle (the author Stendhal), who, as an auditeur, was sometimes
in close contact with him, observes that ‘Napoleon made the mistake of
all parvenus — that of estimating too highly the class into which he had
risen’. He had not realised that in France the monarchical principle
had died with Louis XVI. The bourgeoisie might be prepared to accept
a temporary Napoleonic dictatorship, but sooner or later they would
demand a share in the government. The Malet conspiracy in October
1812, in which the government was nearly overthrown by the simple
announcement that Napoleon had been killed in Russia and none of
his officials thought of proclaiming his son as Napoleon II, came as
a severe shock to him. The climate of opinion which he found in Paris
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on his return from Elba in 1815 shocked him even more. He was
obliged to accept a liberal constitution devised by the ‘ideologist’
Benjamin Constant, the friend of Madame de Stael, as an Acte
Additionnel aux Constitutions de V Empire. At the ceremony of the
Champ de Mai which promulgated the new constitution. Napoleon
appeared in the costume which he had worn at his coronation, of
elaborate pseudo-Renaissance design which jarred with his own per-
sonality and with the spirit of the age.
Napoleon’s appreciation of the political importance of religion may
well have begun with his experience of Corsican politics, and of the
Federalist civil war in France in 1793. In 1793-4 he was in close touch
with Augustin Robespierre, one of the ablest of the Jacobin repre-
sentants en mission, who frequently warned his brother Maximilien of
the danger that militant Jacobin atheism would multiply the Vendean
revolt in the provinces. In Italy he was aware of the danger to his small
army of provoking clerical and peasant fanaticism: and this was re-
flected in his careful treatment of the Pope in the Treaty of Tolentino
(February 1797). It was rumoured when he was in Egypt that he had
adopted the Moslem faith. The Concordat with the Pope in 1801 was
conspicuously the personal policy of Napoleon. ‘In religion, I do not
see the mystery of the Incarnation, but the mystery of the social order.’
‘The people need a religion; this religion must be in the hands of the
government.’ Despite the declaration, in his will at St Helena, that ‘I
die in the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman faith in which I was born
more than fifty years ago’, it can hardly be doubted that Napoleon
remained an agnostic in the tradition of Voltaire and the enlighten-
ment. He told General Bertrand at St Helena that ‘it bothered him
that he was unable to believe’.
Having driven a hard bargain with the Pope in the Concordat, he
intended to make the Pope and the bishops instruments of his policy,
his ‘moral prefects’. Had not the enlightened monarchs of the
eighteenth century treated the Popes with scant consideration ? He was
enraged by the Pope’s insistence on the independence of the Temporal
Power: it was incompatible with Napoleon’s growing conception of an
Empire of the West. At St Helena he said: ‘I should have controlled the
religious as well as the political world, and summoned Church Councils
like Constantine.’ In 1806 he wrote to the Pope: ‘Your Holiness is
sovereign of Rome, but I am its emperor. My enemies must also be
yours.’ When the Pope refused to enforce the continental blockade, he
occupied the Papal States in February 1808; and in 1809, during the
Wagram campaign, he proclaimed the annexation of Rome to the
French Empire. The arrest of the Pope in the Vatican probably went
beyond his instructions, which were to arrest Cardinal Pacca. But
Napoleon hoped that confinement and isolation of the Pope in Savona
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and later in Fontainebleau would wear down his resistance. In 1815
he admitted ‘I was blind. I always believed the Pope to be a man of
very weak character’. But his attitude to the Pope was already as out of
date as the enlightenment; Catholicism was no longer on the defensive.
A religious revival, allied with the romantic movement and a counter-
revolutionary political philosophy, which was to reach its zenith under
the Bourbon restoration, was already heralded by the writings of Maistre,
Bonald, Chateaubriand and Fontanes. The Concordat itself had en-
couraged this movement. It is easy, however, to exaggerate the political
effects of Napoleon’s quarrel with the Pope. The religious fanaticism
of Calabria, Spain and the Tyrol would have broken out, whatever the
state of Napoleon’s relations with the Pope. Even after the arrest of
the Pope, Catholic opinion in the Rhineland, the Low Countries, Poland
and even in the Vendee does not seem to have been greatly stirred.
In his dealings with England, Napoleon also fell a victim to the
‘ideology’ of the Revolution which he so much despised. To him,
as to the Convention, England stood for a ruthless commercial
‘oligarchy’ holding down a population ripe for the principles of the
Revolution. He was shocked by the barbarous methods of discipline
which still prevailed in the English armed forces; and being an abstem-
ious man himself, he was fascinated by the alcoholic consumption of
the English upper classes. The ‘drunkenness’ of English officers was a
theme on which he harped at St Helena. He was exasperated by the
excesses of the English press, especially when a paper like the Morning
Post could refer to him as ‘an indefinable being, half- African, half-
European, a mediterranean mulatto’. The wild inflation caused by the
paper-money of the Revolution, the assignats, was associated in his
mind with the privations of his youth; and it had left him with a deep
distrust of financiers. Looking at England’s vast national debt and her
resort to paper-money since 1797, he assumed that her wealth was
fragile and vulnerable.
The weapon of economic warfare, which he inherited from the Con-
vention and developed into the Continental System after Trafalgar, was
based on this assumption. By the Treaty of Amiens Napoleon intended
to exclude the English both politically and commercially from the
Continent; and it was the dashing of English hopes of a commercial
treaty with France, and Napoleon’s cold-war encroachments on the
Continent, that precipitated the rupture of the treaty. On his failure to
preserve the peace, a French historian comments, ‘It is impossible to
say if the task was beyond his genius; it was certainly beyond the
capacity of his character.’ 1
1 A. Vandal, L' Avinement de Bonaparte (Paris, 1905).
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In 1798 Napoleon had reported to the Directory pessimistically on
the prospects of an invasion of England. ‘With all our efforts we shall
not for many years obtain command of the sea. . . . The suitable
moment to prepare for this undertaking is perhaps gone for ever.’
But his ignorance of the technicalities of naval warfare made him unable
to grasp or unwilling to admit that English naval superiority could not
be challenged. At St Helena he complained that ‘there is a specialisa-
tion in this profession which blocked all my ideas. They always re-
turned to the point that one could not be a good seaman unless one was
brought up to it from the cradle’. Unlike the unfortunate Admiral
Villeneuve, Napoleon was not aware of the immense divergence that
had developed since the Revolution between the English and French
navies in standards of seamanship and gunnery. In the American War
of Independence they had fought more or less on equal terms. But the
Revolution had deprived the French navy of most of its experienced
officers, disbanded its corps of seamen gunners and ruined discipline.
The English strategy of close, continuous blockade of the French ports
deprived the French navy of adequate training: while hard and con-
tinuous experience at sea brought the English standards of seamanship,
signalling and gunnery to a pitch of perfection. The tactics of breaking
the line, instead of fighting in line ahead, first used by Rodney in the
Battle of the Saints in 1782, could now be developed by Nelson into a
battle of annihilation, which was the naval counterpart of the Napoleonic
battle on land. Shortly before Trafalgar, Villeneuve wrote, ‘We have
obsolete naval tactics ; we only know how to manoeuvre in line, which
is what the enemy wants’.
In view of the immense preparations (Chapter III. B, p. 80) it can
hardly be doubted that Napoleon really meant to invade England
between 1803 and 1805. At the same time the ‘Army of England’ had
the advantage of enabling him to concentrate and train, in a time of
peace on the Continent, the finest army he was ever to command. If
he ever seriously considered a crossing by the barge-flotillas without
temporary command of the Channel by the battle-fleet, the idea was
soon dropped, when it became evident that only a proportion of the
flotillas could leave the ports at each tide. In the spring of 1804,
Napoleon issued detailed instructions to Admiral Latouche-Treville,
commander of the Toulon squadron, for a combined operation of the
fleet with the flotilla. He was to elude Nelson’s blockade in the
Mediterranean, join Villeneuve’s Rochefort squadron, and enter the
Channel. ‘Let us be masters of the Straits for six hours, and we shall
be masters of the world.’ Latouche-Treville, the best of the French
admirals, died in August 1804, and for some months the plan was
shelved.
The entry of Spain into the war against England in December 1804
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altered the prospects. The French ambassador in Madrid reported
optimistically that Spain could have thirty ships of the line ready in a
few months. Napoleon now conceived his ‘grand design’ by which
Villeneuve, now in command at Toulon, should sail for Martinique,
after picking up a Spanish squadron, and there meet Ganteaume with
the combined Brest, Rochefort, and Ferrol squadrons. Having thus
forced the English fleet to disperse in defence of the West Indies,
Villeneuve would return with temporary command of the Channel to
cover the crossing of the flotilla. Villeneuve sailed at the end of March
1805, and succeeded in eluding Nelson, who was obsessed by the threat
to Sicily, Malta and Egypt. He did not know for certain till 18 April
that Villeneuve had passed through the Straits of Gibraltar. By the
middle of May Villeneuve was at Martinique, with Nelson hard on his
heels, favoured by a fast passage. Ganteaume had failed to break the
blockade, and Villeneuve was now instructed to return to Ferrol if
Ganteaume had not joined him within forty days. Nelson was able
to send a fast ship to warn the Admiralty of Villeneuve’s departure
from the West Indies. Calder’s squadron off Ushant was ordered to
intercept and prevent Villeneuve from entering Ferrol. After an in-
decisive clash with Calder, Villeneuve took refuge in Corunna. By
18 July, Nelson was back at Gibraltar, and finding that Villeneuve had
not re-entered the Mediterranean, moved north to join Calder.
Napoleon’s plan had started well, but he had failed to disperse the
English fleet. Lord Barham, now First Lord of the Admiralty in place of
Dundas, had followed imperturbably the principle of concentration of
force. Napoleon assumed that Nelson had returned to the Mediter-
ranean. On 16 July he instructed Villeneuve to join Ganteaume at
Brest, but gave him discretion to retire to Cadiz ‘in case of an unfore-
seen event’. By 14 August, Villeneuve was at sea again, but on sighting
five ships of the line he turned south to Cadiz. By the irony of fate,
these were not the vanguard of the English fleet, but Allemand’s Roche-
fort squadron. Napoleon had been waiting at Boulogne since 3 August,
ready to embark the army. As late as 23 August he wrote to Talleyrand
‘There is still time — I am master of England’. But Admiral Deeres,
his minister of marine, who had never believed in the possibility of
dispersing the English fleet, begged him not to order Villeneuve north
to certain destruction. On 24 August, Napoleon dictated to Berthier
the orders for the Grand Army to break up the Boulogne camp and
march to the Danube.
Once the English fleets were concentrated, it was fatal for Villeneuve
to allow himself to be blockaded in Cadiz; he should have made for
Toulon as soon as possible. By the end of September Nelson was off
Cadiz with thirty ships of the line against the Franco-Spanish fleet of
thirty-three; his only fear was that Villeneuve would not be tempted to
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come out, and he kept his main force well out to sea to conceal his
strength. Villeneuve was in a desperate state of mind, acutely conscious
of the inferior quality of his fleet, and knowing that he was about to be
superseded in his command. Finally he received orders from Napoleon
to sail for Naples ‘at all costs’ to counter the Anglo-Russian expedi-
tionary force which was threatening the flank of the Grand Army. When
Villeneuve emerged from Cadiz on 20 October, the result was never in
doubt. Nelson had thought out his battle-tactic before he left Ports-
mouth, and thoroughly explained it in conferences with his captains.
‘Rodney broke the line in one point: I shall break it in two.’ With
further reinforcements he would have used a three-column attack.
Nelson and Collingwood led the two columns which broke the enemy
line, and crushed the centre and rear. ‘I shan’t be satisfied with less
than twenty ships.’ Nelson died knowing that eighteen enemy ships had
sunk or struck; in the event only ten of Villeneuve’s fleet got back to
Cadiz, and of these only three could be made fit for action.
Trafalgar disposed of any threat to English command of the sea for
many years; but Napoleon did not admit that the decision was final.
The lure of Spain in 1808 was partly the hope of ‘regenerating’ the
Spanish navy. Canning’s decision to seize the Danish fleet in 1807 and
the Walcheren expedition of 1809 show that English governments took
seriously a revival of the challenge to English naval superiority. Re-
duced to 35 ships of the line in 1807, Napoleon hoped to have 102 by
1812. But by this time the English naval lead was overwhelming; in
1813 Napoleon could only count on 71 ships of the line, against
England’s total of 235.
If Trafalgar had indefinitely postponed a direct naval and military
attack on England, the weapon of economic warfare might yet bring
her to her knees. With the collapse of Prussia after Jena and the Tilsit
agreement with Russia in 1807, Napoleon was in control of the whole
northern coastline of Europe through which passed the bulk of English
trade with Europe. In November 1806 he issued the Berlin Decree
which declared that the ‘British Isles are in a state of blockade’; all
commerce with them was prohibited, and all goods belonging to, or
coming from, Great Britain and her colonies were to be seized. The
Continental System thus inaugurated was aimed at exports, not imports:
it was, in fact, a boycott, not a blockade. Napoleon told his brother
Louis, King of Holland, ‘I mean to conquer the sea by the land’.
In August 1807 he predicted the plight of England with ‘her vessels
laden with useless wealth wandering around the high seas, where they
claim to rule as sole masters, seeking in vain from the Sound to the
Hellespont for a port to open and receive them’. Given his conception
of England’s financial structure, Napoleon was optimistic about the
speedy effect of this boycott. If her exports were stifled, her delicate
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balance of payments would be upset: she would be unable to subsidise
continental allies with her sovereigns, the ‘Chevaliers de St George’,
and then unemployment would produce either a revolutionary upheaval
or at least a public clamour which would force the government to make
peace.
English opinion at first greeted the Berlin Decree with derision;
caricatures showed Boney blockading the moon. The coast system
which had been in operation since 1803 had proved quite ineffective;
and English trade continued to flow through Holland and the North
German ports. Moreover world markets were an expanding alternative
to Europe. In the years 1803-5, Europe took only 33 per cent of English
exports and the United States took 27 per cent, while 40 per cent went
to the rest of the world, principally the colonies and South America.
Contraband trade with South America was considerable, and in 1806
great hopes were raised by the capture of Buenos Aires and Montevideo.
But after Tilsit the pressure began to be felt. In his Grand Army
Bulletin of July 1807 Napoleon threatened that ‘It is probable that the
Continental System will not be an empty word’. In July 1807 there
was fear in England of war with the United States when the U.S. frigate
Chesapeake was boarded by the Royal Navy in search of deserters. A
simultaneous closing of Northern Europe and the United States to
English trade would be extremely serious, as together they accounted
for 60 per cent of English exports. Moreover Napoleon’s discrimina-
tion against English merchant shipping might divert the profitable
colonial trade to neutrals. The English government replied to the
Berlin Decree with the Orders in Council of November and December
1807, requiring neutral ships to be furnished with a licence in an English
port. Napoleon in turn intensified the pressure on neutrals by the
Fontainebleau and Milan Decrees of October and December 1807 which
declared that neutral ships complying with the Orders in Council
would be treated as English ships. President Jefferson hoped by his
Embargo Act of December 1807 to force the belligerents to relax their
controls, but in practice it caused only harm to American interests, and
was repealed in March 1809.
Though the total volume of English exports for the year 1807 was
satisfactory, the figures conceal the fact that there was a serious drop in
the second half of the year, and this continued through the first half of
1808. Exports to Europe sank to 15 millions as compared with 19 J
millions for the corresponding period in 1807. This menacing situation
was unexpectedly relieved by the opening of the Peninsular War. The
flight of the Portuguese royal family, and the refusal of the Spanish
colonies to acknowledge King Joseph, meant that English trade with
South America was now open and official. The Spanish rising, and the
French defeat at Baylen (July 1808) in turn encouraged Austria to attack
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Napoleon, and during the Wagram campaign of 1809 Napoleon lost his
grip on Northern Europe. English exports in 1809 reached a record
height. As early as March 1809, Napoleon began to waver in his policy
of strict prohibition. The success of the ‘smogglers’ was such that he
preferred to authorise limited trade with England in colonial produce,
subject to high tariffs, in exchange for French wines and silks. The
licence-system was regularised by the Trianon Decree of 1810 but it
never accounted for more than a fraction of English exports.
After Wagram Napoleon was in a position to tighten his grip on
Europe. Holland, the Hanseatic towns and the Duchy of Oldenburg
were annexed to the French Empire. The ruthless Davout was put in
command of North Germany. The Fontainebleau Decrees of October
1810 ordered the seizure and burning of English manufactured goods,
and the establishment of special tribunals to strike at the contraband
trade. These measures hit the English economy when it was already
running into a combination of difficulties. The Peninsular and Wal-
cheren campaigns put a heavy strain on the gold-reserves and balance
of payments. The capacity of the South American markets was
wildly over-estimated. The colonial and New World markets might
compensate for the loss of European markets but in the long run these
markets could only pay in colonial products, of which Europe was sub-
stantially the sole consumer. In 1810 a glut of colonial produce was
piling up in English ports. By September 1810 a wave of bankruptcies
heralded a severe economic crisis. Unemployment and distress were
aggravated by the bad harvests of 1808 and 1809, and the government
was forced to import wheat. Moreover Napoleon had succeeded in
embroiling England with the United States. He offered to revoke the
Milan decrees if the Orders in Council were also abolished. In February
18 1 1 President Madison, failing to persuade the English government
to revoke the Orders, reimposed the embargo. Napoleon saw signs
that the expected crisis in England’s economy was at hand, and en-
couraged the import of wheat from France and Holland for payment in
gold. Would he have done better to withhold these exports and so
intensify the high prices and scarcity which provoked the Luddite dis-
turbances of 181 1 ? But it is unlikely that continental imports of wheat
could have been decisive, as they were only a quarter of the total wheat
imports in 1810, and a reasonable harvest in 1810 brought relief. The
year 18 11 was the worst of all for English exports, and the outlook
remained gloomy until Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. Meanwhile
the United States had declared war on England in June 1812, in the
very month that the obnoxious Orders in Council were finally revoked.
It appears from this fluctuation on the economic front that the
Continental System could exert severe pressure on England, when it was
rigorously applied. To be decisive, it had to be so applied over a fairly
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long period: in fact it was only properly in force from mid- 1807 to
mid- 1 808 and from mid-1810 to mid-1812. The most dangerous threat
to England was a conjunction of the Continental System with a rupture
with the United States. In 1812, Napoleon was not far wrong in think-
ing that victory in Russia would also settle the fate of England. But he
considerably underestimated the toughness and resilience of the English
economy. A system of banking and credit, such as was unknown to
France, had been built up since the days of Godolphin, Walpole and the
Younger Pitt. Nor had Napoleon reckoned with the speed and scope of
the industrial revolution in England. In 1785 England and France were
comparable in economic development. But between 1785 and 1800,
while France was retarded by the upheavals of the Revolution, England
was experiencing one of the major technological revolutions in human
history. By 1800 Boulton and Watt had built and installed hundreds of
their steam-engines, particularly in the important exporting industry of
textiles.
The price that Napoleon had to pay for embarking on the gamble of
the Continental System was a heavy one. He intended it, not merely as
a method of economic warfare, but as a decisive shifting of the axis of
European trade from England to France. As in 1802, French industry at
first welcomed the opportunity of exploiting European markets free
from English competition. But by the beginning of 1810 the French
economy was in serious difficulty. There were shortages of raw materials
for industry, and the purchasing power of the Continent was reduced
by the large war-indemnities and contributions exacted by France from
enemy and vassal states. French overseas commerce, languishing since
1793, was completely sacrificed; the great ports like Marseilles and
Bordeaux seethed with discontent and latent royalism. Napoleon’s
policy took the blame for the economic depression of 1810-12, despite
his keen interest in industrial development and his large subsidies to
manufacturers. The support which Napoleon had won from the
bourgeoisie during the Consulate was irretrievably dissipated by the
crisis of 1810-12. Agriculture, to which Napoleon gave priority,
suffered less. It was helped by the export of surplus wines and wheat,
and by the development of beet sugar and indigo as substitutes for
colonial produce.
In his propaganda on behalf of the Continental System, Napoleon
took the line that Europe must undergo temporary hardship in order
to achieve emancipation from the English ‘tyranny of the seas’ and
commercial domination. If he had genuinely aimed at fostering a free-
trade area in Europe, he might have won more support. But the
Trianon Tariff of 1810 made it obvious that France was to enjoy
exemptions, denied to the rest of Europe, from the hardships of the
system. In 1810 Napoleon told Eugene, his viceroy in Italy, that ‘my
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policy is France before all’. Mettemich predicted that ‘this mass of
ordinances and decrees which will ruin the position of merchants
throughout the Continent will help the English more than it harms
them’. Moreover it was impossible, despite Napoleon’s efforts to
develop roads and canals, for land-transport in the pre-railway age to
begin to compete with the relative cheapness of sea-transport. Not only
in France but in Italy, Germany and the Low Countries it was the
bourgeois class that was most likely to respond to Napoleon’s claim to
stand for enlightenment and equality: and by the Continental System
he forfeited their support. The logic of the system was an important,
though not the only factor in the fatal errors of his European policy —
the Spanish entanglement, the breach with the Pope, and the war with
Russia.
Some historians have sought to explain the extension of Napoleon’s
empire in Europe as a by-product of his struggle with England, and of
the Continental System. Such a view under-estimates the extent of
Napoleon’s ambition, and the radical nature of his European policy.
As early as 1805 Talleyrand had foreseen the essential contradiction
between Napoleon’s conquests and his desire to be admitted into the
club of legitimate European monarchs. If the ‘natural frontiers’ of
France and the Napoleonic dynasty were to be preserved, Napoleon
must acknowledge a European balance of power. Talleyrand therefore
wanted a ‘soft peace’ with Austria after Austerlitz, and after Tilsit
surreptitiously disengaged himself from Napoleon’s fortunes, in his own
interests and, as he believed, in the interests of France and Europe.
But in his treaties and alliances Napoleon was willing to acknowledge
only vassals, never equals. Such an attitude implied a claim to ‘uni-
versal monarchy’. But if Napoleon could defeat the monarchies, how
could he hold down the peoples ? In the light of developments after 1815
it is puzzling that Napoleon as emperor paid so little heed to the force
of nationalism. At St Helena he fabricated the legend which presented
his career as a struggle on behalf of the peoples against the dynasties.
But this was an afterthought and a travesty of the facts. The Napoleonic
empire was the negation of nationality, and never more so than after
1810.
As the heir of the Enlightenment and of the Revolution, Napoleon
was cosmopolitan in outlook. Nothing is more revealing than his
complete inability to understand the psychology of the young Austrian
patriot, Staps, who tried to assassinate him in Vienna in 1809. After
talking to him for some time after his arrest, he was driven to the con-
clusion that he must be mad. In 1789 the French had made the
‘ Declaration of the Rights of Man ’.not merely of Frenchmen. By 1 802
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the decay of the old regime in Europe appeared to be leading to the
emergence of a united Europe, with uniform and enlightened law,
administration and citizens. Napoleon was a zealous propagandist for
the Code Napoleon ; and the code was the vessel in which the administra-
tive and social principles of the Revolution were exported, as far as
Illyria and Poland. He told Jerome, King of Westphalia, that ‘in
Germany, as in France, Italy and Spain, people long for equality and
liberalism. The benefits of the Code Napoleon, legal procedure in open
court, the jury, these are the points by which your monarchy must be
distinguished. . . . Your people must enjoy a liberty, an equality
unknown in the rest of Germany’.
Napoleon did not foresee, until too late, that sweeping away the
lumber of the old regime would only allow the latent seeds of nationalism
to sprout vigorously. He was not alone in this error, which was shared
by many of his contemporaries. Up to 1805 the moral and ideological
forces seemed to be on Napoleon’s side. It was only in 1804 that
Beethoven struck out the dedication of his Eroica Symphony to
Napoleon: and Goethe remained an admirer of the emperor, and totally
uninterested in German nationalism, until the end of his life. The
statesmen of the Congress of Vienna paid no more attention to the
principle of nationality than had Napoleon: with less excuse, because
they could already see the writing on the wall. It must be admitted that
the march of events and the evolution of ideas under the pressure and
turmoil of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars were so rapid that
men’s minds could not keep pace with them.
Earlier in his career Napoleon seemed willing to encourage national
aspirations in Italy. The Cisalpine Republic became in 1802 the Italian
Republic, and in 1805, the Kingdom of Italy under the viceroyalty of
Eugene. But in 1806 the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was given to
Joseph, and in 1808 to Murat. Various principalities were carved out of
Italian territories for the benefit of the Bonaparte family and the
imperial dignitaries. In 1806 the Duchies of Parma and Piacenza were
annexed to the French Empire; in 1808 Tuscany also, and in 1809 the
Papal States. The Illyrian provinces taken from Austria in 1809
remained directly under the control of Napoleon through a governor-
general. In 18 1 1 the title of King of Rome given to his son fore-
shadowed the merging of Italy into a European empire. Rome was to
be the ‘second city of the Empire’ and plans were drawn up for a vast
imperial palace to be built on the Capitoline Hill. The Napoleonic
reforms in Italy, partial and inconsistent as they were, were a landmark
in the development of the Risorgimento. Uniformity of law and
administration, and the application of conscription, helped to break
down particularism. Italian troops fought well in their own divisions;
and the Napoleonic officers and civil servants were to form the spear-
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head of the Risorgimento after 1815. But only a handful of intellectuals
like Alfieri and Foscolo openly turned against Napoleon because he had
betrayed their hopes of Italian unity. When Murat tried to rouse
Italian nationalism against Austria in 1815, he met with very little
response. Active resistance to French rule was local, clerical and
reactionary: guerrilla warfare in Calabria between 1806 and 1808 tied
up considerable numbers of French troops. Napoleon seems to have
ignored the political implications; as he ignored the military portent
of the battle of Maida in 1806, when the firepower of the English infantry
under General Stuart defeated General Reynier’s columns in a few
minutes.
In Germany Napoleon continued the historic policy of Richelieu and
Louis XIV — that of keeping Germany divided by fortifying the
particularism of the client kingdoms grouped in the Confederation of
the Rhine. Up to 1806 he hoped that Prussia would remain within his
system as a vassal state; he afterwards regretted that he had not taken
the opportunity after Jena of eliminating Prussia altogether. The
creation of the Saxon Duchy of Warsaw in 1807 appeared to be a step
towards the restoration of Poland. But Napoleon was in fact interested
in Poland only as a pawn in his strategy. At Tilsit he first suggested
that Russia should have the whole of Poland and that Silesia should
go to Jerome Bonaparte: the Duchy was a compromise solution. In
1812 he disappointed the Poles by his evasive pronouncements about
Polish independence.
The origins of German nationalism are discernible in the intellectual
sphere long before it affected politics. The intellectual renaissance of
Germany at the end of the eighteenth century, headed by such great
writers as Goethe, Kant, and Schiller, was at first cosmopolitan in out-
look. At the turn of the century the romantic movement began to
modify the rationalism and cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment: its
interest in history, custom and tradition, and in the language and litera-
ture of the Volk, pioneered by Herder, was a powerful stimulant to
national consciousness. The initial enthusiasm in German intellectual
circles for the French Revolution gave way to a conservative and
religious reaction which condemned the anarchy and atheism of the
Terror, and exalted the spiritual superiority of a distinct, unique
German culture. But nationalism was still conceived as cultural, not
political. Schiller wrote in 1802 that ‘the greatness of Germany
consists in its culture and the character of the nation, which are inde-
pendent of its political fate’.
The turning-point in the intellectual evolution of cultural into political
nationalism was the collapse of Prussia in 1 806. The younger generation
of intellectuals such as Fichte, Arndt, Kleist and Schlegel began to
preach patriotic resistance to Napoleon. The collapse of the Prussian
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government gave a chance for the nationalists to gain control: Frederick
William was forced to appoint Stein and Hardenberg as his ministers in
1807. Hardenberg wrote in his memorandum on reform (September
1807) ‘The French Revolution, of which the present wars are only a
continuation, has given France, in the midst of stormy and bloody
scenes, an unexpected power. The force of the new principles is such
that the state which refuses to accept them will be condemned to submit
or perish.’ Gneisenau, who had seen the American militia in action in
their War of Independence, also wrote: ‘The Revolution has set in
motion the national energy of the entire French people. ... If the
other states wish to restore the balance of power they must open and
use the same resources.’ Frederick William and the Junkers feared and
disliked a ‘Jacobin’ policy, and sabotaged much of Stein’s far-reaching
reforms. After his dismissal in 1808, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau
succeeded, however, in carrying through an effective reform of the
army. The abolition of serfdom and of degrading punishments, the
exclusion of foreign mercenaries, and a drastic overhaul of the officer
corps improved the army’s spirit and tactics; the adoption of con-
scription in 1813 allowed it to be rapidly expanded (Chapter VIII).
In Austria also reform was the work of a handful of men like the
Archduke Charles, Stadion and Hormayr, and was hampered by the
Emperor Francis’s distrust of ‘Jacobinism ’. The army was modernised,
and a reserve Landwehr created in 1808. After the defeat of Wagram,
the emperor was disgusted with the ‘patriots’ who had dragged him
into a disastrous war. In April 1813, he wrote to Napoleon, ‘Every
prolongation of war which does not allow the sovereigns to devote
themselves seriously to stamping out the Jacobin ferment which daily
spreads, will soon threaten the existence of thrones.’ The patriotism
aroused in the war of 1809 was Austrian and Habsburg in its appeal
rather than German, and the guerrilla warfare under Hofer in the Tyrol
was directed more against Bavarian anti-clericalism than against the
French.
Central Europe did not produce, either in 1809 or in 1813, a general
guerrilla resistance such as appeared in Spain. The spirit of nationalism
was hardly yet stirring beyond a comparatively small circle of in-
tellectuals, reformers and officers. The German nationalists of the
nineteenth century created a romantic legend when they christened
Leipzig the ‘Battle of the Nations’. The collapse of the Napoleonic
Empire cannot simply be attributed to the rise of national consciousness,
to the exclusion of the military and diplomatic factors, without dis-
torting the perspective of European history.
Because Spain was the first example of large-scale resistance to
Napoleon, it was hailed as a portent of a general movement in Europe.
Napoleon was particularly enraged by the suggestion that two of his
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divisions had surrendered to Spanish partisans at Baylen (July 1808).
In fact, Dupont’s raw conscripts had been defeated by Spanish regular
troops, and he had signed a convention for evacuation, which was
subsequently broken. In his bulletin announcing the capture of Burgos
(November 1808) Napoleon tried to dispel this propaganda. ‘It would
be a good thing if men li ke M. de Stein who, lacking regular troops
which were unable to resist our eagles, entertain the sublime idea of
arming the masses, could see the misfortunes which ensue, and the
weakness of the obstacles which this resource can offer to regular troops.’
It is true that the French army had little difficulty in defeating Spanish
armies in the field, and that without Wellington’s army organised
resistance would soon have collapsed. Wellington wrote home in August
1809, ‘The Spanish troops will not fight; they are undisciplined, they
have no officers, no provisions, no means of any description.’ And
again in October 1809 he wrote, ‘As to the enthusiasm, about which so
much noise has been made even in our own country, I am convinced
that the world has entirely mistaken its effects.’ The unpredictable
character of Spain is shown by the history of the French Bourbon inter-
vention in Spain in 1823. Wellington and most observers then assumed
that the French would get into the same trouble as in 1808. Nothing of
the sort happened, principally because on this occasion the French were
intervening on behalf of the king and the Church against a minority of
liberal reformers. Spanish nationalism had very little in common with
the general movement of European nationalism in the nineteenth
century which sprang from the liberal middle-class.
Napoleon completely misread the temper of the Spanish people from
the start. After Tilsit he was in his most dogmatic and ruthless mood.
Metternich, who was then Ambassador in Paris, observed in October
1807, ‘There has recently been a total change in the methods of
Napoleon: he seems to think that he has reached a point where modera-
tion is a useless obstacle.’ In February 1808, Napoleon wrote to
Caulaincourt: ‘As for Spain, I tell you nothing but you can understand
that it is necessary to shake up this power, which is useless to the
general interest.’ In April 1808, he wrote to Murat, his lieutenant in
Spain: ‘If there are movements in Spain they will resemble those we
saw in Egypt.’ Even when the people of Madrid rose against the French
on 2 May, and had to be savagely repressed by Murat, he wrote that
‘the Spaniards are like other peoples and not a class apart. They will
be happy to accept the imperial institutions.’ In his proclamation to the
Spanish nation on 28 May he wrote, ‘I wish your descendants to say
“He is the regenerator of our country”.’
Napoleon had an exaggerated notion of the latent resources of Spain,
both naval and economic, which were being mismanaged by the in-
competence of her rulers, the decadent and disreputable trio of the
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Bourbon King Charles IV, his queen and the favourite, Godoy. Lured
by the prospect of gaining Portugal for himself, Godoy had kept Spain
in uneasy alliance with France, but during the Jena campaign he showed
signs of disloyalty to it. At the end of 1806 Napoleon demanded that
Spain should adhere to the Continental System and send a corps to
occupy Hanover. In October 1807 he sent Junot to occupy Portugal,
promising Godoy that he should have southern Portugal as a principality
for himself. As Junot’s army crossed Spain, he was able to infiltrate
troops at strategic points. Meanwhile Ferdinand, Charles IV’s heir,
was afraid that Godoy intended to usurp the throne at his father’s
death, and negotiated with Napoleon for the overthrow of Godoy. The
idea thus grew in Napoleon’s mind of regenerating Spain by an efficient
French administration, either by marrying Ferdinand to a Bonaparte
princess, or by a deposition of the degenerate Bourbons. A revolt took
place against the king and Godoy, and the king abdicated. Napoleon
summoned the royal family to meet him at Bayonne, and the result of
the conference was that the king and Ferdinand both abdicated their
rights to the throne, and Napoleon gave it to his brother Joseph.
Up to the Bayonne meeting the Spanish people remained quiet
because they thought Napoleon intended to back Ferdinand against
Godoy. While the grandees of Madrid were accepting an enlightened
constitution from Napoleon at Bayonne, the provinces were flaming
into spontaneous revolt. Canning hastened to give support to the in-
surrectionary juntas, and Wellesley forced Junot to evacuate Portugal
by the victory of Vimiero (August 1808). The main Spanish regular
forces were easily defeated at Medina del Rio Seco (July 1808), and
Dupont was ordered to march south with two divisions and occupy
Cadiz. Here he was caught by 20,000 Spanish regular troops supported
by guerrillas, and forced to capitulate at Baylen (July 1808). Napoleon
was at last forced to recognise that he had a full-scale war on his hands,
and ordered the mass of the Grand Army from Germany to Spain.
At the end of 1808 he assumed command there himself, and narrowly
failed to catch Moore’s army in the Corunna campaign. He never
appeared in Spain again and, distrusting Joseph’s competence, pre-
ferred to send orders from Paris to his disobedient and quarrelsome
marshals.
The turning-point of the Peninsular War came in 1810-11. Having
dealt with Austria in 1809, Napoleon gave Massena 100,000 of his best
troops with orders to ‘drive the English leopard into the sea’. Massena
was defeated by Wellington’s defensive tactics at the lines of Torres
Vedras, and by the jealousy of Soult who failed to back him up from
Andalusia. Thereafter Wellington was able to take the offensive and by
the victories of Salamanca (1812) and Vitoria (1813) to drive the French
out of Spain.
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Although there was a considerable pro-French party in Spain,
Napoleon’s mistake was in thinking that there was a sufficient middle
class which would welcome the reforms of the Code Napoleon, including
the secularisation of Church property. In fact Spain was predominantly
a country of priest-ridden peasants, swayed by religious fanaticism and
a reactionary provincial patriotism. The enlightened reforms of Charles
III in the eighteenth century had been greeted with sullen hostility.
Napoleon described the Peninsular War as ‘a war of monks’; and it did
resemble the wars of the Vendee on a large scale. The Cortes which met
at Cadiz in 1810 promulgated a liberal constitution to compete with the
enlightened constitution formulated under Napoleon’s eye at Bayonne.
But in the light of subsequent history it is difficult to believe that this is
what most of the Spanish guerrillas were fighting for. When Ferdinand
was restored in 1814 the people shouted ‘Long live the absolute King’
and ‘Down with the Constitution’. It is by no means certain that
French intervention in itself would have produced the explosion,
especially if Napoleon had followed his original intention of backing
Ferdinand. Once Napoleon was committed to keeping Joseph on the
throne, he could not face until too late the loss of prestige involved in
cutting his losses in Spain. In November 1813 he exclaimed, ‘I have
sacrificed hundreds of thousands of men to make Joseph reign in Spain.
It is one of my mistakes to think my brother necessary to assure my
dynasty’. The veteran troops locked up in Spain might well have turned
the scale in Germany in 1813, and it was not till the beginning of 1814
that Napoleon offered to restore Ferdinand to the throne.
The conclusion to be drawn from this analysis is that Napoleon, in
his mentality and his policy, had much in common with the enlightened
despots of the eighteenth century. His claim to be the ‘Roi des Peuples ’
rests on the legend, not the reality. On the day after his coronation he
made the extraordinary but perhaps prophetic remark, ‘I have come
too late: men are too enlightened. It is no longer possible to do great
things. Compare Alexander.’ Both his strength and his weakness lay
in the attempt to harness explosive political forces which he could not
comprehend or control.
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CHAPTER XII
FRENCH POLITICS, 1814-47 1
T he defeat and abdication of Napoleon did not automatically mean
the restoration of the Bourbons. That solution had secured the
more or less reluctant consent of those who could have any
influence on the decisions — that is to say, the Allies on the one hand and
on the other the leading figures in the government of the Empire, repre-
sented by the Senate and by the provisional government over which
Talleyrand presided. But, even after that, the exact nature of the future
regime was still undecided. Monarchy, no doubt, but what brand of
monarchy? The pre-1789 monarchy, with the king ruling by divine
right, his good pleasure limited only by his own conscience and by the
traditional privileges of the various groups and collective bodies of
State? Or the 1791 monarchy, the king ruling only with the authority
delegated by the nation and as the nation’s principal servant, by virtue
of a contract freely entered into by both parties ?
The senatorial party, including as it did the surviving members of the
revolutionary assemblies, clearly hoped to secure the triumph of the
second solution. They had the support of Tsar Alexander of Russia,
who had announced his intention of securing a regime in France
corresponding to the enlightened spirit of the age. The very day the
emperor abdicated, the Senate adopted a constitution in conformity
with the principle of popular sovereignty. It was stated therein that the
late king’s brother was freely called to the throne, and might reign only
after swearing to observe this constitution. The condition was un-
acceptable to the Pretendanf, since the death — shrouded in mystery —
of his unfortunate nephew, Louis XVII, he had considered himself the
only legitimate monarch, and had always shown himself inflexible
where his rights and dignity were concerned. Still, the prince was
intelligent enough, and sufficiently matured by his trials, to be inclined
to make the necessary concessions. He manoeuvred cleverly to preserve
the principle of a monarchy not deriving its authority from the will of
the people. He did not hurry to leave England, where he had been
living since 1807; and when he arrived in France, on 24 April, the
enthusiastic welcome from the people in the north, and the mani-
festation of their devotion offered by the various representative bodies
and by the marshals of the army, put him in a strong bargaining
position.
1 At the editor’s request, a sketch of the developments under Louis-Philippe, not much
noticed in vol. x, is included here.
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At the moment of his entry into the capital he had the Declaration
of Saint-Ouen published, the terms of which had been worked out by his
representatives and those of the Senate: the senatorial constitution was
put aside, on the pretext that it had been drawn up too hurriedly ; the
king undertook to have another framed by a commission of both
Chambers; assurances were given that the constitution would be a
liberal one, and the principles that it was proposed to embody in it were
briefly stated, together with guarantees of a kind to reassure those who
had benefited under the previous regime.
This new constitution, known as the Constitutional Charter, solemnly
proclaimed on 4 June 1814, was to provide the framework of the French
State (with a few minor changes in 1830) up to the revolution of 1848.
It is essentially a work of compromise, and by this very fact shows well
enough the balance of political and social forces in the country at the
time.
The theory of royal power by dynastic right or by divine right,
otherwise called the principle of legitimacy, was affirmed in a long
historical preamble, in which the limits set on the old absolutism were
presented as ‘gracious concessions’ due to the king’s free-will, and
consequently involving no impairment to the principle of his authority. 1
But on the other hand the chief political and social victories of the
Revolution were confirmed in a great many clauses; equality of all
men before the law and in respect of taxation and military service;
freedom of the individual, freedom of thought and expression, freedom
of religion — though with this new fact, that the Catholic religion was
declared to be the State religion, no longer just the religion of the
majority of Frenchmen, as it was under the regime of Napoleon’s
Concordat of 1801. The Civil Code of the Empire was retained en bloc ;
Church or emigre properties that had been sold as ‘belonging to the
nation’ remained the property of those who had bought them. Titles,
decorations, pensions and ranks granted by preceding regimes were
allowed to stand, and the State recognised all its financial obligations.
Finally, the rigorously centralised administrative system established
under Bonaparte’s Consulate also remained unchanged.
The king retained considerable power under the political mechanism
set up by the Charter :
The King’s Person is inviolable and sacred. . . . Executive power belongs only to the
King (Art. 13). The King is the supreme head of the State, he commands the armed
forces on land and sea, declares war, makes peace treaties, alliances and trade
agreements, nominates to all public administrative offices, and makes the rules and
ordinances necessary for the execution of the laws and the safety of the State
(Art. 14).
1 ‘ Nous avons volontairement, et par le libre exercice de notre autorit6 royale, accord^
et accordons, fait concession et octroi & nos sujets . . . ’
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The ministers were responsible to him, not to the two Chambers.
He retained part of the legislative power, since he alone could initiate
laws, and not even an amendment could be made to some debated
text save with his consent. National representation was assured by two
Chambers: the Chamber of Peers, nominated by the king, and the
Chamber of Deputies. A law was to determine the way in which
deputies were to be elected, but the Charter laid down that electors must
have reached 30 years of age and be paying 300 francs in direct tax,
whilst to be eligible for election candidates must have reached 40 years
of age and be paying tax of 1000 francs. The two Chambers were
on an equal footing in the framing of laws; but the budget had to be
voted first by the deputies. The Chamber of Peers would function on
occasion as a High Court of Justice to judge crimes of high treason.
The king was to summon the two Chambers and determine the duration
of their sessions; he might dissolve the Chamber of Deputies. Judges
were to be nominated by the king, but their independence was assured
in that they could not be dismissed.
T his regime, though inspired by the English model, cannot be called
parliamentary in the present sense of the term, since the government
would not depend on a parliamentary majority; and it was representative
only if we are prepared to admit that fewer than 90,000 persons privileged
by their wealth — for that was the number of electors paying 300 francs
in tax — validly represented the nation. Even though we may feel that
the constitution limited too severely the number of men who could take
part in the political life of the country, we must admit that material and
social conditions for the working of a truly democratic regime were far
from being realised in the France of this period. More than half the
French nation were illiterate, and knew of events only through talk in
taverns and markets. In the provinces where religion kept its vitality,
as in Brittany, the priest’s opinion was law. About 75 per cent of the
population lived in small villages and were absorbed in their agricul-
tural labours. Apart from the capital, which had more than 700,000
inhabitants, only two cities — Lyons and Marseilles — had above 100,000
and not more than five had over 50,000: Bordeaux, Rouen, Nantes,
Lille and Toulouse. Small provincial towns were well enough linked
with one another and with the capital by the network of some 20,000
miles of royal roads maintained by the State; but many villages remained
practically isolated, through lack of the means for road-building — for
what could take the place of the corvee ? As for the main highways —
with their coaching stations at regular intervals — the time and money
consumed by a journey put their use out of reach of the great majority,
and notably restricted the circulation of goods, and of ideas too.
The periodical press, systematically stifled by Napoleon, was to go
on being submitted under the Restoration to restrictions that would
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limit circulation. In 1826 the fourteen political newspapers in the
capital together totalled only 65,000 subscribers, and there was no
casual sale. Lastly, the rigorously centralised administrative system
helped to choke provincial political life and to concentrate it in Paris.
‘The nation,’ wrote Benjamin Constant in 1812, ‘exists to-day only in
the capital.’
In the pays legal — that is to say, that minority of citizens sufficiently
well off to have the right to vote — we can distinguish three social
groupings. First, the big landowners: contrary to what is often alleged,
this class was not wholly devoted to the conservative party; alongside
the nobility that had managed to save their lands during the Revolution,
it contained nouveaux riches who, by purchasing ‘national property’,
had profited from the Revolution and had acquired estates. Though
the former might incline towards reaction, the latter must fight hard
against everything that recalled the ancien regime. Amongst the liberal
opposition leaders we even find aristocrats, landed proprietors of the
old regime, such as Lafayette and the Due de la Rochefoucauld-
Liancourt. Secondly, the industrial magnates, merchants and bankers :
in contrast to the position in England, these economic activities had
been closed in the past to the nobility. The rich bourgeois who by
inheritance occupied these controlling positions in the economy feared
a return to the old regime, with its State controls, quite as much as
those who had bought ‘national property’ feared it; and for class
reasons, too, they could put up with artistocratic pretensions less
patiently. Thirdly, the leading civil servants, recruited from the two
categories above, especially from the first : by definition it was they who
upheld the ministry of the moment; and, if they were tempted to forget
the fact, summary dismissal brought it back to mind soon enough.
The beginnings of the new regime were not happy. Less than a year
after his return Louis XVIII had to flee shamefully before Napoleon.
The ease with which the nation at first appeared to accept this revolution
may be explained by the discontent that prevailed in a large part of
public opinion. This discontent was due in good part to circumstances
beyond the control of Louis XVIII’s government. The loss of territories
conquered twenty years previously was an inevitable consequence of
Napoleon’s defeat: all the same, it was bitterly felt as a national
humiliation. The state of the treasury, likewise a consequence of the
defeat, imposed strict economy: cessation of public works; the dismissal
of many civil servants; the placing of many of the officers of the
Napoleonic army on half pay, since they no longer served any useful
purpose; lastly, the retaining of the unpopular droits reunis (excise
duties), despite the rash promise to abolish them which the king’s
brother had made when he came back to France. Nor was it in the
king’s power to silence former emigres who were claiming back their
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former properties, now in the hands of others, any more than he could
silence those members of the clergy and of the aristocracy who were
demanding that the old order of things be re-established, despite the
royal intentions proclaimed clearly in the Charter. It remains properly
a charge against Louis XVIII, and more especially against the princes of
the family, that these pretensions were encouraged by the revival at
court of outworn institutions, the costly re-forming of the ceremonial
troops of the Royal Guard, and by the too pointed and exclusive favour
shown towards former companions in exile; that memories of the
revolutionary period were re-awakened by ceremonies of expiation;
and finally, that a section of the nation had been disquieted by policies
too openly favourable towards the Church.
However this may be, clearly these mistakes would not have sufficed
to bring about a catastrophe if Napoleon had stayed quietly on his
island. The miraculous ease of his return to Paris was due essentially to
the military element, and does not mean that the nation as a whole
wished to have imperial despotism restored. At the time of the plebiscite
concerning the Acte Additionnel — the new constitution granted by
Napoleon — and the election of the new legislative body, citizens and
electors abstained en masse.
The conditions under which the king’s second return took place were
to weigh heavily on the regime’s future. In the immediate aftermath of
Waterloo and of Napoleon’s second abdication (22 June 1815), the
materials were assembled for a civil war between Frenchmen. The
royalist party, which had been almost non-existent in 1814, was now
large, and filled with hatred of its opponents. Whereas the year before
all who served the State had rallied without any difficulty to Louis XVIII,
now those who had broken their bond and had followed Napoleon
found themselves compromised, with no going back. The emperor had
abdicated in his son’s favour only, and the army was passionately
devoted to the imperial dynasty, as was a section of the ordinary folk
of Paris; the Legislative Body, dominated by liberals such as Lafayette,
inclined towards the Due d’Orleans, Louis XVIII’s cousin: but it also
contained plenty of partisans of Napoleon II. Wellington, marching
on Paris with his victorious army, was determined to do his utmost to
establish the Bourbon king again ; but he was to find a hundred thousand
determined men facing him beneath the walls of the capital, under the
command of one of Napoleon’s ablest lieutenants, Marshal Davout;
and the outcome of a battle fought under these circumstances was not
certain. If in these conditions France managed to avoid the double
scourge of continued war abroad and an outbreak of civil war at home,
that fact was in large measure due to the skill of a quite unscrupulous
man. Joseph Fouche, former Convention member, and former minister
of police under the Empire, had been kicked out by the first Restoration
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as a regicide. When Napoleon came back from the island of Elba he
gave him back the Ministry of Police, and Fouche had made use of it to
establish his own contacts, in all parties. After the battle of Waterloo
his aim seems to have been to lead the country, with the least possible
damage, towards the solution which in the long run could not be
avoided, as his realistic view of things told him. By serving the king in
this way he hoped to safeguard his own interests, and the interests of a
class that had profited from the Revolution: of which class Fouche
was himself the perfect representative.
This plan required first of all that Napoleon be eliminated: and this
first aim was achieved when Napoleon abdicated and left for the port of
Rochefort. Fouche had a provisional commission of government
nominated, and made himself president of it. He got rid of Lafayette
by having him entrusted with an entirely hopeless mission to the Allied
Command, and kept the Chamber occupied by inviting it to draw up a
Constitution. Finally he persuaded Davout that a further battle, even
if it ended in victory, would only prolong the war uselessly and add to
the evils of foreign invasion. A military convention was therefore
signed on 3 July, whereby the French army might withdraw behind the
Loire, whilst the armies of Wellington and Bliicher were to occupy the
capital without bloodshed. From then on Napoleon II’s partisans in
Paris found themselves powerless. Fouche went in secret to Louis
XVIII, who had hastened back from Belgium to France behind
Wellington’s armies, and met him at Saint-Denis. Despite his repug-
nance Louis XVIII consented to make Fouche one of his ministers.
Next day Fouche calmly told his colleagues in the provisional govern-
ment that their role was now over, and that all was in order for the king’s
return. One squad of the National Guard was enough to block the
access of the deputies to the Legislative Body. They went home without
putting up the least show of resistance.
Louis XVIII re-entered the Tuileries on 8 July. Everything had to
be started all over again, and under conditions disastrously less favour-
able than in 1814. Then, the Allies had used their victory with modera-
tion, leaving the country almost at once and imposing no monetary
contributions. This time they were firmly resolved to make the in-
corrigible nation feel the weight of defeat, and to recover a large part of
the cost of the last campaign. Until peace was concluded sixty-one
French departments were going to find themselves occupied by 1,000,000
foreign soldiers, crushing the population by their requisitions and
harassings. The second treaty of Paris (20 November 1815), besides
some further lopping of territory, was to impose an enormous financial
burden on France, and temporary occupation of the frontier pro-
vinces. As the disasters were associated with the king’s return, they
inevitably aroused patriotic sentiments of humiliation, directed against
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the Bourbons, who were exposed to the shameful charge of having
‘come back in the foreigners’ baggage’.
Equally serious for the future was the fact that the nation found
itself sharply divided into two camps. In 1814 the Restoration came
about in such a way that there were neither victors nor vanquished.
This time, the exasperated royalists were to insist on reprisals against
those whose treason had brought on the disasters of 1815; while the
emperor’s followers, marked out by their conduct during the Hundred
Days, found themselves barred for ever from the roads to power —
condemned, so to say, to go in fear and into opposition. And this
opposition was to benefit from the unnatural but infinitely dangerous
alliance between liberal revolutionary ideology and the military
nationalism of the Empire.
The first year of Louis XVIII’ s government after his return was
marked by three things that were important for the future of the
regime: the white Terror, royalist differences, and the miscarriage of
parliamentary government.
Popular reaction had been unleashed in the royalist provinces of the
south as soon as the events in Paris were made known: some of the
emperor’s followers were massacred, notably in the department of
Gard and at Marseilles; whilst many more had to undergo all sorts of
rigours and humiliation. When Louis XVIII returned, he had an-
nounced his intention of limiting sanctions to those chief army officers
and leading civil servants whose participation had been decisive in
March 1815; shortly afterwards a list of fifty-seven names was pub-
lished. The best guarantee of moderation on the part of the govern-
ment lay in the composition of the ministry itself; almost all who sat
beside Talleyrand and Fouche were men who had formerly served
Napoleon. But this ministry was not to survive the assembly of a new
Chamber of Deputies. Because the Chambers of the first Restoration
had not found time to vote the electoral law prescribed in the Charter,
the king had wanted, for the elections that took place at the end of
August 1815, to enlarge the Napoleonic electoral colleges by lowering
the minimum age for electors from 30 to 21 years and that of candidates
from 40 to 25, whilst the number of deputies was raised from 262 to
402. The result was a surprise to the government: the majority turned
out to be made up of relatively young and zealous royalists, who were
soon dubbed ‘ultra-royalists’. It was, as Louis XVIII put it, a Chambre
introuvable.
Even before the opening of the session the deputies let it be known
that they declined to collaborate with a government that included
Fouche the regicide. Talleyrand sacrificed his old accomplice, appoint-
ing him the king’s representative at Dresden, then himself retired (22
September). Louis XVIII replaced him by the Due Armand-Emmanuel
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de Richelieu, a grand seigneur whose generous and disinterested charac-
ter commanded respect. Whilst an emigre in Russia, he had served
Alexander I as governor of the southern province recently won from the
Turks. The friendship shown him by the tsar had given hope that he
would secure better peace conditions than Talleyrand, who was
compromised by his anti-Russian dealings at the Congress of Vienna.
Next to the president of the council the most important figure in the
new ministry was Elie Decazes, a young magistrate and a native of
the Bordeaux region, whom Fouche had been unwise enough to make
prefect of the Paris police. This led on to his becoming minister in charge
of the police of the whole country. Gifted with great flexibility, with
rare charm and also rare talent for intrigue, and totally devoid of
scruple, Decazes had succeeded in winning the affection of the old king,
who soon made him his favourite and called him his ‘dear son’.
Under pressure from the Chambre introuvable the ministry drew up
and carried repressive measures permitting the imprisonment of suspects
without trial, severe punishment of the authors of writings or mani-
festations hostile to the regime, the creation of cours prevotales in-
tended to punish attempted rebellion by court martial procedure, and
the exiling of those former regicides who had supported Napoleon
during the Hundred Days. A few of those chiefly responsible were tried
and condemned to death — amongst others Marshal Ney, whose trial
before the peers stirred great emotion; the execution of this gallant
soldier was to be an ineffaceable stain on the Bourbon regime. Royalist
reaction showed itself, too, in systematic purgings in the administration
and the army that deprived at least a quarter of the civil servants and
army officers of their jobs.
In the early weeks of 1816 the government tried to put a brake on the
reactionaries, and it was then that a division between ultra-royalists
and moderate, or ministerial, royalists appeared for the first time in
the Chamber of Deputies. The moderates proved to be in the minority;
the government did not succeed in getting an electoral law voted, and
had the greatest difficulty in getting the budget voted before the close of
the session (29 April 1816).
It was clear that when parliament reassembled the ministry would
find itself unable to govern, so lively was the hostility of the majority
towards the favourite Decazes. By resigning he would have established
the principle that was being upheld in the Chamber by the ultra-
royalists’ spokesmen, whereby the king was obliged to choose ministers
acceptable to the majority; it would have amounted to setting up the
practice of a parliamentary regime within the framework of the Charter.
Louis XVIII, encouraged by the pressing advice of the Allies, decided
to dissolve the Chambre introuvable (5 September 1816) and by this act
affirmed the preponderance of the crown over national representation;
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by a strange irony of circumstances this gesture was applauded by the
very men who posed as the defenders of liberal principles.
The elections carefully prepared by Decazes took place with the
same electoral colleges, but the number of deputies was put back to
262, and their age was increased to 40 as laid down in the Charter.
This made it possible to oust a good many of the ultra-royalist deputies,
and in the new Chamber the ministerial party proved to be in a majority.
From then on, as the three powers — king, ministry and chambers —
were in agreement, Louis XVIII was able to experiment with a middle-
of-the-road government, aiming on the one hand at barring the pre-
tensions of the ultra-royalists, and on the other at rallying to the
monarchy those who in one way or another clung to the Revolution. It
was to succeed on the first point, but on the second it was to fail; for all
efforts made to conciliate the liberals were to end merely by strengthen-
ing the parties that were hostile to the monarchy, and putting the regime
itself in danger. This second point has often not been sufficiently
underlined.
During the four years that this experiment lasted— from 1816 to
1820 — the political forces in the country, as in parliament, were
divided among three tendencies.
The ultra-royalists — as their opponents called them, for they pre-
ferred to call themselves ‘true royalists’ or simply ‘royalists’ — would
not allow any attempt to found a monarchical regime on concessions
to the principles or the men of the Revolution. Some, such as the
philosopher Louis de Bonald, considered Louis XVIII’s Charter ‘a
work of folly and of darkness’. Others, such as Chateaubriand, were
disposed to accept it and to derive from it an order of things at once
monarchical and consistent with the tendencies of the century. They re-
jected the ideology of the eighteenth-century philosophes, whence the
Revolution had sprung, and sought to restore the Church’s influence in
society. Lamennais at that time was the most fervent defender of this
ideal of the union of altar and throne. La Quotidienne was the paper
that stood for this ultra-clerical tendency; the Journal des Debats, per-
haps the most influential paper of the time, took Chateaubriand’s line.
The Conservateur, a review edited by Chateaubriand, and appearing at
irregular intervals from October 1818 to March 1820, brilliantly de-
fended the party’s ideas. The ultra-royalists were supported by the
heir-apparent (the king’s brother, Comte d’ Artois) and in general by the
royal family and the court; and, most powerfully, by the clergy also.
Party directives were spread through the country by the secret organisa-
tion called the Chevaliers de la Foi, a sort of Catholic and royalist
counter-masonry; it had been founded at the close of the Empire, and
was not without influence on the restoration of the monarchy in 18x4.
A unit of the organisation existed within the Chamber of Deputies, and
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this gave the party a discipline and cohesion which astonished outside
observers.
The ministerial or constitutional party by definition supported the
government’s middle-of-the-road policy. The administrative machine
was in its control, and it could speak through the Moniteur, the official
State newspaper. Its ideological inspiration came from a small group of
writers known as the doctrinaires : Royer-Collard, Guizot, the Due de
Broglie, and others. They were sincerely devoted to the monarchy and
to the Bourbons, and sought, in the phrase that Decazes made popular,
to bring the king closer to the nation and the nation closer to the king
(‘nationaliser la royaute et royaliser la nation’).
The group known as the Independants brought together under this
misnomer all who opposed the regime : liberals, republicans, Orleanists,
Bonapartists. Benjamin Constant supplied the brains of the party,
Lafayette its banner, and Laffitte, the banker, its moneybags ; the king’s
cousin the Due d’Orleans flirted with it, circumspectly. The masonic
secret societies, and later the Charbonnerie (Carbonari, imported from
Italy about 1821), made it both wide-spread and effective. The Con-
stitutionnel, a paper produced under various labels, was later to be
the movement’s most popular organ; but in Decazes’ time its views
were put forward in La Minerve, a review well edited by Benjamin
Constant, and appearing at irregular intervals. The constitutional party
took advantage of its greater numbers to get passed a long-overdue
electoral law: as the Charter laid down, electors had to show an assess-
ment of 300 francs payable in direct taxes, and candidates for election
an assessment of 1000 francs; elections were to take place by direct
voting, all electors coming to the chief town of a department to vote
(this provision was to work in favour of the liberal party, whose
members were mostly townsmen) ; finally, one-fifth of the Chamber was
to be renewed each year. A law reconstituting the army on a new basis
was vigorously opposed by the right-wing royalists because it seemed
weighted too much in favour of former officers of the Empire. It
worried the Allied powers for this same reason. Nevertheless Richelieu
managed to secure the end of foreign occupation in 1818; loans by the
houses of Baring (London) and Hope (Amsterdam) had enabled the
French treasury to meet all the financial obligations imposed by the
1815 treaties, and this despite a severe agricultural crisis that hit the
country in 1817.
Richelieu came back at the end of 1818 from Aix-la-Chapelle, where
he had negotiated so successfully, determined to re-orientate his home
policy. The Allies were worried by the spread of liberal ideas in
France, and wanted to see the king’s government draw closer to the
right-wing royalists. Since Decazes, for his part, was determined to
persist in his policy of conciliation towards the Left, there was an acute
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crisis within the ministry. It ended in Richelieu’s resignation, and in the
formation of a new ministry with General Dessolles as nominal pre-
sident, but with Decazes as real head (29 December 1818). Decazes
consolidated his position by getting the king to create sixty new peers,
who swung in his favour the majority in the Chamber of Peers. A law
was passed, inspired by the Doctrinaires, giving the press a relatively
liberal regime; the main innovation was that actions against journalists
were to be tried by jury, thus protecting them from the arbitrary
action of government.
In the elections (autumn 1819) the Independants won so much success
that Decazes himself was alarmed by it, and decided to go into reverse.
Some of his colleagues declined to follow him in this complete change of
front, however; there was a fresh crisis, and a fresh shuffling of the
government, and Decazes was unwillingly obliged to become president
of the council himself (November 1819). He was busy negotiating with
the Right about modifying the electoral law, when an unforeseeable
accident threw him out of power. During the night of 13-14 February
1820 a fanatic assassinated the king’s nephew the Due de Berry, alone
of the princes capable of ensuring the survival of the elder branch of the
Bourbons. ‘It was not the guiltiest hand that struck the blow’ wrote
Chateaubriand at the time; in effect, the royalists put the responsibility
on Decazes for the state of mind capable of inspiring the crime. Louis
XVIII had to resign himself to the dismissal of his * cher fils ’, and call the
Due de Richelieu back to head the government. The elimination of
Decazes set a seal on the dissolution of the constitutional party of the
centre; its remaining members were to join themselves on to the right
or left wings, retaining more or less trace of their origin under the labels
‘right centre’ and ‘left centre’.
Without delay the press was put back again under a regime of strict
censorship, and (as in 1815) the government was given authority to
arrest without trial. But a new electoral law was needed, to reverse the
tendency which in recent years — so it had seemed — must shortly give
to the Left control over the parliamentary majority: the new law was
passed at the end of June 1820 after violent debate, accompanied by
disturbances in the streets of the capital. The system provided for two
kinds of electoral college : on the one hand those of the arrondissements,
containing all the electors who paid 300 francs in direct tax, and electing
258 deputies; on the other, those of the departments, the grands colleges,
which were to choose 172 additional deputies and were to consist of
one-quarter of the electors in each department, namely those paying
the highest tax. As this amounted to giving two votes to those who were
richest — and therefore presumed to be most conservative — this electoral
law of 1820 was called the Taw of the double vote’.
Two circumstances intensified the result that had been expected from
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this. The first was the failure of an attempted liberal and Bonapartist
coup de force which had Lafayette behind it, and which frightened
those who genuinely wanted order. The second was the posthumous
birth of a son to the Due de Berry, a chance next to miraculous for
assuring the continuity of the dynasty (29 September 1820). The
elections of the month of November 1820 considerably strengthened
the ultra-royalist party in the Chamber. Richelieu nevertheless intended
to go on governing with the ministers whom he had inherited from
Decazes, without making way for the leaders of the new majority. When
the two Chambers reassembled at the end of 1821 they joined their votes
to those of the left-wing opposition in condemning the government’s
foreign policy. Richelieu resigned (12 December 1821), as the king,
weakened by age, showed no determination to support him vigorously.
The new ministry was entirely composed of members of the ultra-
royalist party, acceptable to the king’s brother, ‘Monsieur’. And indeed
it seemed as though the heir-apparent was already beginning to reign
in his brother’s name. The dominating personality in this new team was
the Comte Joseph de Villele, minister of finance, whose primacy was
confirmed in September 1822 when he became President of the Council.
Coming from the lesser gentry of the Toulouse region, Villele had shown
himself unrivalled in the Chamber of Deputies by his skill in debate and
by his practical grasp of affairs. Thanks to him, the financial adminis-
tration of France was to know a period of regularity and prosperity
almost unique in her history. As head of government he showed himself
tireless in parliamentary debate, fertile in expedients, at once tenacious
and supple in his plans. But as his mind tended fundamentally to be
interested in material problems, and because of his cunning and jealous
nature — and his timid pacifism, too, in foreign policy— his government
had a low and utilitarian stamp about it, of a sort displeasing to a nation
now stirred by romantic breezes and by her memories of the Imperial
epic. Nor did he dare to stand out against certain foolish demands made
by his party; and by his personal animosities he made royalist divisions
worse. He believed he was master of the situation because he had the
king’s confidence and the support of a majority of the Chamber, and he
did not trouble, therefore, to conciliate opponents or manage public
opinion.
When the royalist government came to power its opponents believed
it would soon be discredited through incapacity. They were soon
deceived, for Villele and his colleagues scored so many successes in their
uphill struggle that two years later the regime seemed to be firmly
consolidated. Throughout the administration reliable and devoted
men replaced any that were suspected of left-wing sympathies. Fresh
conspiracies by the Carbonari were foiled by the police, with severe
punishments. The press was placed under a regime that, without
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reviving the censorship, did seriously curtail its freedom of expression.
Secondary education had been put under the supervision of the clergy
by an ordinance of 27 February 1821; this seizure of education by the
Church was confirmed by the creation of a Ministry of Church Affairs
and Public Instruction. It was held by a bishop, Mgr Frayssinous, who
in fact was an enlightened and moderate man. Nineteen archbishops
and bishops became peers.
The government’s position was more strongly reinforced by the
success of the French intervention in the Spanish revolution than by all
these measures. The intervention was determined upon in agreement
with the great continental powers, and despite the furious opposition
of the liberal party. Villele himself had become resigned to it only with
the gravest apprehensions, and under pressure from Chateaubriand,
who had become Minister of Foreign Affairs at the end of 1822. Cruel
memories of Napoleon’s reverses in Spain had made the undertaking
appear fraught with perils: but in fact it was carried through with
complete success, at least at the military level. The army came back
from it with its morale strengthened in devotion to the monarchy ; the
collapse of the Spanish liberals discouraged enemies at home. French
liberals found themselves in disrepute because they had predicted so
many disasters, and also because they seemed dejected by a success
that afforded the country’s pride some satisfaction. Chateaubriand
could boast: ‘eight years of peace have not strengthened the legitimate
throne as much as have twenty days of war’. The government hastened
to make political capital out of its advantage. At the end of December
1823 the Chamber was dissolved. The general elections that took
place on 26 February and 6 March were an overwhelming success for the
ministry: the liberal opposition was reduced from no to 19 seats. It
was, as Louis XVIII put it, la Chambre retrouvee. The victorious party
intended to give itself the leisure in which to take up quietly again the
work of reaction interrupted in September 1816: one of the first things
it did was to vote a law suppressing the annual renewal of a fifth of the
Chamber, and it raised the duration of the parliamentary mandate to
seven years.
Nevertheless, the very extent of the royalist party’s parliamentary
victory made for conditions threatening its cohesion. A group of
extreme right-wing deputies had already appeared by 1820, accusing
Villele of being too moderate: the annihilation of the Left was to give
them full liberty of action. In the Chambre retrouvee of 1824 this
‘counter-opposition’ was to number about seventy deputies. The
president of the council was unwise enough to aggravate their quarrels
by the revenge he took against right-wing personalities who criticised
his policy. His worst mistake of this kind was the dismissal of
Chateaubriand. The great writer’s prestige and vanity, carried to their
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zenith by the success of the Spanish expedition, weighed upon the
president of the council. In May 1824, in the Peers, Chateaubriand
refused to support a project for a loan conversion that Villele was
absolutely set on, and he was dismissed in the most insulting fashion (6
June 1824). Chateaubriand at once became head of the counter-
opposition, and took the Journal des Debats with him. The Journal now
began to denounce the government’s sins in violent tones. ‘An un-
adventurous administration, without glory, full of cunning, greedy for
power; a political system out of sympathy with the genius of France,
and contrary to the spirit of the Charter; an obscure despotism, mis-
taking effrontery for strength; corruption raised to the level of a
system. . . .’
The death of Louis XVIII (16 September 1824) and the accession of
his brother Charles X made a temporary diversion. The fact that the
new sovereign was apparently welcomed by all parties without any
trouble, even gladly welcomed, emphasised the progress that had been
made since 1816, when everyone, including the Allies, thought that the
change of reign would bring troubles with it inside the realm. Charles X,
though less intelligent than his brother, had a more attractive and more
generous character. As king he was very anxious to do the job well, and
to attach his subjects to him; he therefore quickly announced that he
adhered to the Charter, and he suppressed the censorship which Villele
had re-established shortly before Louis XVIII died.
Moreover, there were no changes in the members of the government.
After Chateaubriand’s dismissal Villele was undisputed master of the
government. All the same, he was to be less able to resist the pressure
from a section of his majority demanding reactionary measures; not
merely because he was going to need them in order to stand up to the
right-wing opposition, whose numbers were increasing dangerously,
but also because the new king’s views inclined him towards the ultra-
royalist programme, especially in matters of religion.
The indemnity granted to emigres — the first important measure voted
in Charles X’s reign — has often been ascribed to Charles’s reactionary
spirit. But in fact the initiative for this measure went back to Louis
XVIII, and what was involved was quite other than the interests of a
single class of Frenchmen. So long as former land-owners who had
been despoiled by the Revolution did not recognise the transfers that
had taken place — and how could they? — property of this kind was
afflicted by a sort of moral blemish, which decreased its value and made
transactions difficult; most of all, the new owners had feelings of guilt
and uncertainty that prevented them from rallying to the monarchy
in all sincerity. The answer was to render void the claims of former
owners by making them accept an indemnity. The difficulty was to find
the money, about a thousand million francs. Villele had thought that
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it would be possible to provide for it by distributing the indemnity in
the form of 3 per cent stock; the money needed annually to service this
new item of the national debt would come from a conversion of the
5 per cent stock, the market price of which had risen at that time
considerably above its nominal value. The measure was put forward in
May 1824 and was defeated by the peers’ opposition to it. Villele
learned by experience, and at the beginning of 1825 changed his tactics;
first he got the principle passed that there should be an indemnity for
emigres, and then got the financial arrangements accepted that were to
create the necessary resources. But in the course of the bitter debates
in the two Chambers and in the press, most painful memories of the
Revolution were revived. And the small investors — most of them
Parisian bourgeois — suffered from the fall in the rate of interest and the
general weakening of the stock market. This was still further accentuated
by an economic crisis that affected all Europe. Yet, if the ministry could
be accused of having sacrificed the interests of the people to the greed
of the emigres, at least there were no longer to be two kinds of property
in France, and the problem of biens nationaux disappeared from political
life.
At the same time the government was intensifying its policy in favour
of the Catholic Church. The chief demonstration of this was the voting
of a law punishing acts of sacrilege in churches by death; the conditions
necessary for finding the offence proved were such that in practice the
law could not be applied, but its promoters — they included Bonald —
had wanted to demonstrate for the sake of principle against the secularity
of the State; the opposition denounced it, also on principle, as opening
the way to a theocracy, since it required the secular power to intervene
in favour of a truth that was purely theological in nature. The king’s
coronation, which took place at Rheims on 29 May 1825 and followed
the ancient ritual with barely any change, appeared to demonstrate the
crown’s submission to priestly authority.
In other respects the government’s religious policy, which since 1820
had become more resolutely favourable to the Church, began to make
its results felt. Relations between Church and State continued to be
controlled within the framework of Napoleon’s Concordat: negotia-
tions entered into by Richelieu in 1816 and 1817 with a view to changing
it had failed, because of the gallican prejudices of the majority of parlia-
ment, and the intransigence of the Holy See. Nevertheless thirty new
dioceses had been created, and the State budget for the Church raised
to twice what it was in 1815. A big effort had been made to secure the
recruiting of clergy; the bishops had been allowed to open Church
schools or petits seminaires exempt from the University’s control; the
number of students in the theological colleges ( grands seminaires ) had
almost doubled in ten years, and in 1825, for the first time for a long
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while, more young priests were ordained than old ones buried. Like-
wise, congregations of religious were being revived, whose existence
was not recognised by the then laws ; the government’s tolerance offset
this, and in 1825 it even had a law passed giving legal status to the con-
gregations of nuns. As for the men’s congregations, save for a few
exceptions they had to be content with a de facto existence that gave
them no right to own corporate property. The Society of Jesus was
amongst them: Pius VII had reconstituted the Jesuits, and in 1826 they
had charge of seven secondary schools — disguised as petits seminaires
so as to escape control by the University authorities. The University
itself, as we have seen, was coming more and more under the Church.
Teaching was to be the preserve of the clergy, it seemed, as it was before
the Revolution. Laymen were encouraged to help the clergy in works
of piety and welfare. The famous Congregation founded and inspired
by the Jesuits drew its members from the aristocracy of birth or posi-
tion. Its members were behind a number of other activities of various
kinds: amongst them the Societe de la Propagation de la Foi, which
collected money for Catholic foreign missions. Home missions, con-
ducted with plenty of money and with an outward show intended to
strike the imagination, sought to bring about the return to the faith of
people dechristianised by the Revolution. Despite all these efforts the
Papal nuncio in Paris, Mgr Macchi, estimated in 1826 that more than
half the population was indifferent towards religion, and that in Paris
barely 10,000 men used the sacraments.
In these conditions — to say nothing of the very active Protestant
minority of 500,000 — a policy that might perhaps have suited a 100 per
cent Catholic nation, or that set out to achieve that proportion willy-
nilly, could not fail to arouse hostile re-actions. And round about this
time, it is true, opposition polemics seemed to concentrate on religious
matters. Clerical domination, government submission to the orders of
the Congregation, ultramontanism, priestly obscurantism, the setting up
of an Inquisition, the revival of tithes, and — above all — Jesuit intrigues
(which were made into a real bogey), such were the themes broadcast
in thousands of pamphlets, newspaper articles, caricatures, and songs.
Whether deliberately concerted or not, these tactics gave the liberals a
double advantage: they could run down the regime without directly
attacking the king or the constitution ; and they were able to split the
royalists, quite a lot of whom remained attached to the rationalism of
Voltaire or to eighteenth-century parliamentary gallicanism.
The government was weakened by the campaign, and suffered two
serious parliamentary defeats. The ministry wanted to strengthen the
landed aristocracy, who were the regime’s chief stay, by avoiding the
endless fragmentation of estates through the play of successive in-
heritings. With this aim in view, in 1826 it put forward a proposal for a
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law modifying the Napoleonic civil code in respect of inheritance; the
idea was to secure preferential rights in favour of the eldest son, in
families rich enough to have a 300 franc assessment of tax. The liberal
opposition denounced this measure as being an attempt to restore the
social order of the ancien regime, with its droit d'amesse. The peers
threw out the proposal. In the following session, in 1827, Villele and
his minister of justice, Peyronnet, alarmed at the more and more hostile
current which was carrying public opinion along, tried to take counter-
action by attacking what they believed to be the root of the evil: the
press. As the king did not wish to have recourse to censorship in
advance of publication, and as the courts showed themselves very
weak in dealing with offences, the remedy seemed to be a new law
considerably restricting the circulation of newspapers and printed
matter in general. The bill gave rise to memorable discussions in the
Chamber on the question of the freedom of the press ; left-wing and right-
wing oppositions joined hands in its defence. In the end, despite the
fact that the deputies had finally passed the bill, the government was
obliged to withdraw it in face of the peers’ determined opposition.
This opposition had to be broken. Villele persuaded the king to
appoint seventy-six new peers. At the same time the Chamber of
Deputies was dissolved (6 November 1827). Villele’s reasoning had
been as follows: since public opinion was turning more and more
against him, and since in any case partial elections must be held to
replace forty deputies elevated to the upper chamber, it would be
better to go straight to a general election before it was due, and so take
the opposition unawares. If he managed to get a working majority
again he would be master of the parliamentary situation for another
seven-year period. It was a gamble — and a failure. For the elections of
November 1827 proved that even then Villele had underestimated his
unpopularity with the electorate: the new Chamber was to contain
only 170 to 180 government supporters, against an almost equally large
opposition of liberal tendencies on the left, and a right-wing opposition
of about seventy. Charles X resigned himself to changing ministers: he
chose a team of secondary figures, some of whom had been in the
previous administration. There was no president of the council.
Martignac, a Bordeaux lawyer, was his minister of the interior: he was
likeable and spoke well, and was the king’s mouthpiece in the Chambers.
This government soon found itself in an exceedingly uncomfortable
situation; the king would have liked to continue Villele’s policy, but
in order to find a majority in the Chamber the ministry was obliged to
make concessions to the left: changes in administrative personnel, a new
and more liberal regime for the press, safeguards against governmental
despotism in establishing the electoral lists. The main concessions,
however, given the particular nature of the opposition’s campaigns, were
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to be made at the expense of the clergy. The Ministry of Public
Instruction was detached from that of Church Affairs, and given to a
layman; Jesuits were forbidden to teach, and restraints were imposed
on the petits seminaires of such a kind as to keep out pupils who had
no intention of becoming priests; thus the University’s control over
secondary education was re-established (Ordinances of June 1828).
The government also sought to flatter public opinion by pursuing a more
active policy than Villele’s ; Villele had been accused of submitting too
readily to what Metternich or Canning wanted. French intervention in
favour of Greek independence gave the nation’s vanity some satis-
faction but it did not improve the government’s parliamentary position.
Charles X, more and more displeased with the line Martignac was
following, negotiated secretly with the several right-wing royalist
factions — counter-opposition, Villelists, ministerial group — in order to
form a ministry entirely to his liking. The composition of this new
government, brusquely announced on 8 August 1829, was of a kind
calculated to upset public opinion: Prince Jules de Polignac, Minister
of Foreign Affairs and soon president of the Council, bore a name that
conjured up the worst abuses of the old court : besides, he was a former
emigre, and tool of the Congregation-, the Comte de La Bourdonnaye,
minister of the interior, had constantly expressed the most reactionary
views in the Chamber, ever since 1815 ; and finally General de Bourmont,
minister of War, was held to have betrayed Napoleon before Waterloo,
and had testified against Marshal Ney in 1815. The Journal des Debats
summed up the general impression: ‘Coblenz, Waterloo, 1815. There
you have the three principles, the three personalities, of the govern-
ment ... no matter how hard you press it and squeeze it, the only
drops it yields are humiliations, misfortunes, dangers.’
Just when people expected some show of strength, the government
astonished and reassured its opponents by its inactivity. It limited itself
to putting off summoning the Chambers as long as possible, meanwhile
trying to win some prestige in the field of foreign policy: that was the
object of the expedition planned against Algiers. The show of strength
came at last in the month of March 1830, at the opening of the parlia-
mentary session. In his speech from the throne Charles X declared:
‘Should guilty manoeuvres ever place in the way of my government
obstacles which I have no desire to foresee, I would find the power to
overcome them in my resolve to maintain public order, strong in the
confidence and love that Frenchmen have always shown towards their
king.’ The majority address in reply, voted by 221 in favour with 182
against, was a polite rebuke to the king: ‘The Charter . . . confirms as of
right the country’s participation in discussion of the welfare of the
people. That your government’s political views and the wishes of your
subjects should be in unity is, under the Charter, the necessary condi-
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tion of the proper conduct of public affairs. Our loyalty, Sire, and our
devotion, compel us to tell you that this unity does not exist’. This time
the essence of the conflict was clear; was government to represent the
king’s will, or the will of the majority of the Chamber? In adopting the
first of these interpretations Charles X could maintain that he re-
mained faithful to the letter of the Charter; the outcome of the second
must in effect be a parliamentary regime on the British model. Having
prorogued the Chamber the king then dissolved it and announced new
elections. They took place in the first weeks of July; despite all the
efforts of the administration, and despite the king’s personal inter-
vention, the result gave 274 seats to the opposition against 143 to the
ministry: the restricted electorate was disavowing the king. Neverthe-
less Charles X determined to maintain his prerogative; he was en-
couraged to do so by the successful taking of Algiers (5 July), and also
by the memory of the Revolution, when his brother Louis XVI had
saved nothing by making concessions.
The Moniteur of 26 July published four Ordinances that had been
prepared in the utmost secrecy. Taking their stand on Article 14 of the
Charter, which empowered the king to make any regulations and
ordinances necessary to protect the State, they changed the rules
governing the press and the rules for elections, which were normally
the business of parliament. Periodical publications were subject to
preliminary authorisation, which needed to be renewed every three
months. The Chamber elected in July was dissolved without ever
having met, and the new elections were to take place under a system
calculated to cut out liberal voters. The announcement of this coup
d'etat was accompanied by none of the army or police precautions that
any government less inept than Polignac’s would have taken to meet the
all too predictable movement of protest. Three days of disturbances in
Paris, and the resolute conduct of the Duke of Orleans’ followers, put
an end to the reign of Charles X. He abdicated (2 August), and then
took refuge in England.
Thus ended in pitiful failure the attempt at a regime combining the
traditions of the old monarchy with the principles popularised by the
Revolution. If the king had been more skilful, could he have imposed
his point of view on the nation and carried off his coup d'etat success-
fully? We may suppose that such a success would have remained pre-
carious; for, all things considered, the political problem that had been
the immediate cause of this new revolution was not the only problem
involved. Deeper, and perhaps more basic, was the social and moral
conflict between the old ruling classes — the nobles and clergy — seeking
under royal protection to recover their old predominance, and the
bourgeoisie determined to keep the place they had won thanks to the
Revolution of 1789. These fifteen years had not been without their use
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to France, however. Not only had the State recovered its stability and
prosperity thanks to an excellent administration; not only had the
nation risen again, well and truly, after the defeats of 1814 and 1815;
besides all this it had been able to try out, within a limited framework,
and for the first time, the practice of representative government.
The victors of the ‘Three Glorious Days’ — the men who had fired the
shots on the barricades — were doubtless republicans and Bonapartists
for the most part; but once Charles X was out of the way they dis-
covered that they could not impose their will on the politicians. La-
fayette was the only man well enough known to act as leader of this
party; and as usual he showed himself weak and vacillating. The
Orleans party, in contrast, was strong because of the support that the
Paris middle classes gave it in their hatred of disorder and risk, and
strong, too, because of the popularity of the deputies who had stood
out against Charles X. And then, the revolution had been instigated
with Vive la Charte as battle cry; in all logic, therefore, victory could
hardly lead to a change of constitution.
The Chamber hastened all the same to touch up the Charter here and
there in ways calculated to satisfy the Hotel de Ville party and make
sure of its being interpreted in the sense of the liberal opposition to
Charles X. The principle of national sovereignty was obliquely affirmed
by the suppressing of the 1814 preamble, as ‘seeming to grant to the
French people rights which are theirs essentially The Catholic religion
ceased to be that of the State, and once more — as under the Napoleonic
regime— became that of the ‘majority of Frenchmen’. The wording of
Article 14 was changed in such a way as to avoid the unwarranted
interpretation that Charles X had put on it; censorship and extra-
ordinary courts of justice were abolished in perpetuity. The Chambers
were granted the right to initiate laws ; and, pending the voting of the
new electoral law that had been announced, the age-qualifications for
being an elector or a candidate were lowered to twenty-five and thirty
respectively. The new monarch, who was to take the name of Louis-
Philippe I, would be called ‘ King of the French’ and no longer ‘King of
France’. The tricolour was to replace the white as the national emblem,
and the Gallic cock would take the place of the traditional lilies. At
last on 9 August the investiture ceremony took place; and the cere-
monial was deliberately meant to mark the contractual nature of the
new monarchy. Only after he had sworn to observe the revised Charter
did the prince take his seat on the throne and receive the insignia of his
office at the hands of four marshals.
In the course of the following months the features of the new regime
were completed by important new organic laws. First, the organisation
of the National Guard (22 March 1831). ‘Instituted to defend the
constitutional monarchy, the Charter, and the rights confirmed by the
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Charter, to maintain obedience to the laws, to keep or to re-establish
order and the public peace, and to support the fighting troops’, the
Guard was put under the command of elected officers and was at the
disposition of the civil authorities — the mayors and prefects. In effect it
consisted only of citizens who paid some direct tax and could afford
the expense of the equipment. So the middle classes, but not the
common people, found themselves enrolled and armed for the defence
of the regime. In the course of the following years this bourgeois
militia stood constantly in the breach in the struggle against popular
riots. A sort of sentimental solidarity grew up between the Guard and
the citizen-king, who was careful to wear its uniform; and only during
the last years of the regime did this solidarity break down.
Secondly, municipal organisation (21 March 1831). The municipal
authorities were elected by a restricted electoral body; besides civil
servants and the members of certain middle-class professions, this con-
sisted of a varying proportion of the highest- taxed citizens: 10 per cent
in communes of less than 1000 inhabitants, 2 per cent in those of more
than 15,000. Later on, an analogous system reserved to the wealthiest
citizens the privilege of being represented in the departmental councils.
Thirdly, by the electoral law of 15 April 1831, the system of the double
vote of 1820 was suppressed. The tax-qualification for election was
lowered from 1000 to 500 francs; that for the franchise from 300 to 200
francs.
Finally, the peerage was down-graded. In August 1830 the Chamber
of Peers had been mutilated by the arbitrary annulling of Charles X’s
new creations. Others had retired of their own free will, so as not to
swear the oath of loyalty to the new king. A law of 29 December 1831
weakened the aristocratic character of the Chamber by ruling that the
dignity of any new peer would no longer be hereditary.
Thus the French bourgeoisie, having a monopoly of wealth and, to a
large extent, of intellectual culture also, arrogated to itself the monopoly
of political power as well. In the administration it occupied every road
of advancement, for the nobility had been driven out, or had volun-
tarily retired out of fidelity to Charles X. The resources of political power
were to serve the material interests of the bourgeoisie; for example, the
system of protective tariffs and prohibitions built up during the Restora-
tion continued (despite some efforts made by Broglie and Guizot
towards freer exchanges) to exclude foreign competition and to allow
the survival of routine methods at home. The law forbade workers to
unite in defence of their interests. In a country in which population
increases faster than production, free play of the law of supply and
demand ends by reducing the wages of the working classes; and so we
have the contrast of increasing prosperity among middle-class business
men and growing poverty amongst working people. This social
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malaise was clearly seen in November 1831 in the city of Lyons: the
silk-workers had secured a ruling from the prefect prescribing a
minimum wage; the factory-owners refused to apply it; the workers
then rioted and occupied the public buildings; the government dis-
missed the prefect, and sent an army to occupy Lyons: working-class
poverty should not disturb bourgeois order.
The political basis of the regime remained narrow and unsteady.
It could lay claim neither to those sacred traditions that were the
strength of the old monarchy, nor to that popular consent which was the
basis of the republican and even, by virtue of the plebiscite, the Napoleonic
system. The July monarchy was founded under the pressure of Paris in
revolt, and by 219 only of the 430 deputies who should have made up
the Chamber. Out of 35 million Frenchmen, the bourgeois class
numbered only 3 million persons, on the most liberal count. And of
these bourgeois only about 200,000 privileged persons took part in
political life. Finally, within the pays legal itself there were to develop
conflicts that still further reduced the extent to which the basis of
government could be called national. Thus the political system could
be shown in diagram as a pyramid balanced on its point.
Order and prosperity, the bourgeois ideals, were likewise those of the
regime. Generous aspirations, and the spiritual forces of both past and
future, served to strengthen the oppositions, whether of the Right or
of the Left. Historians have doubtless underestimated just how danger-
ous at the beginning was the legitimist — also called Carlist — opposition.
So long as Louis-Philippe’s situation remained insecure, the legitimist
party could count on a good deal of secret support inside the army and
inside the administration. The ordinary folk of Paris were doubtless
hostile to the fallen monarch, but so they were equally towards the new
king. Half-formed alliances sprang up even between republicans and
legitimists, to overthrow the Usurper, each hoping to profit in the
event of a collapse of authority. The old dynasty could muster many
partisans in the provinces — especially where the clergy’s influence
remained strong, as in the west, and in the south along the Mediter-
ranean coast. The legitimist papers profited to the full from the freedom
of the press, and lacked neither money nor talent; Chateaubriand,
amongst others, struck some bloody blows at the expense of the new
regime. Lastly the continental Powers, who had recognised Louis-
Philippe without enthusiasm, were all of them ready to look with favour
on a third restoration. At least two monarchs — of the Netherlands and
Piedmont — gave financial aid.
All these trump cards were lost, through the ineptitude of the Princes
and their advisers. The idea was to put forward the Duchesse de
Berry, the young Due de Bordeaux’s mother. She had only to land at
some chosen point in the realm, and to be surrounded by a number of
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devoted partisans: and then, so they fondly supposed, she could
reconquer the throne — following Napoleon’s experience in 1815 — thanks
to the defection of the troops that would be sent against her. Supposing
this plan (like something out of Walter Scott) ever had the slightest
chance of success, then it should have been attempted in the early
months after the revolution, at a moment when Louis-Philippe’s
government seemed unable to bring anarchy under control. But the
enterprise was put off several times, for futile reasons. When in the end
the Duchesse de Berry did land, on 29 May 1832 close to Marseilles, the
government was well consolidated and on its guard. Even so, she
managed to get as far as the Vendee, but the rioting that took place on
3 June was quickly stamped out. The Duchess hid at Nantes, in the
house of some devoted followers. Only in November did Louis-
Philippe’s police manage finally to discover her hiding-place and arrest
her. She was imprisoned in Blaye fortress, near Bordeaux. But a
captive princess, and romanticism at its height! Here was a situation
even more embarrassing. Luckily for Louis-Philippe the Duchess, a
widow since 1820, was found to be pregnant. Her dishonour once
having been established by the birth of a daughter, she was restored to
freedom. This ridiculous misadventure compromised all chance of a
legitimist comeback. The party resigned itself to putting up a sterile
opposition in the press, and in the Chamber where its spokesman was the
advocate Berryer, considered the greatest orator of the time. The party
tried to popularise itself by adopting a democratic-looking programme,
with universal suffrage and administrative decentralisation.
The Bonapartists could have taken advantage of the incredibly swift
rise of the Napoleonic legend, which the government unwisely fostered.
It organised, for example, ceremonies of great pomp to mark the return
to France of the emperor’s remains (December 1840). But the survivors
of the imperial epic had no cause to complain of the new regime, which
loaded them with honours and material benefits. The premature death
of Napoleon’s son at Vienna (22 July 1832) had completely upset the
party’s plans. The new pretender, Louis-Napoleon, made a fool of
himself by his two attempts at a pronmciamiento, at Strasbourg (1836)
and at Boulogne (1840). After the first he had merely been packed off to
America; after the second they locked him up in the fortress of Ham.
The Republicans were to show themselves more active and more
dangerous. Their hatred for Louis-Philippe, and for the bourgeois
politicians who had robbed them of their victory in July 1830, drove
them to frequent acts of violence. Freedom of the press and freedom
of association, which in the early days were virtually complete, enabled
them to recruit a good many partisans — students, needy clerks and
even, later on, the better-educated members of the working class. The
society called the Amis du Peuple grouped together the most active
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members in the party. It tried to start a revolution in Paris during the
funeral ceremonies of General Lamarque (June 1832), who had been a
very popular figure in parliament. The insurrection set up barricades in
part of the capital, and was broken only after two days of bloody fight-
ing, in which the National Guard gave no quarter.
Another tragedy of bloodshed allowed the government to complete
its defensive system. On 25 July 1835, as the king, with his sons around
him, was reviewing the National Guard, a hail of machine-gun bullets
raked the cortege, killing or wounding forty-one people. The attempt,
which had missed the king, was the work of two republican fanatics,
Morey and Fieschi, who had concealed a kind of makeshift machine-
gun behind the shutters of a window. Outraged public opinion allowed
the government to get the ‘September Laws’ passed, making the pro-
cedure for the courts of assize more efficient, and submitting the press
to as strict a regime as possible without actually re-introducing a
censorship. Moreover, this last measure was applied also to prints and
other illustrations, which the opposition had used with great effect up
till then in their attacks on the king and those in high places.
Thus armed, the government was able to stifle public propagation of
revolutionary ideas, though not to prevent criminal plotting. There were
further attempts on the king’s life. The republican ideal enjoyed in-
direct support from many intellectuals: novelists, such as George Sand
and Eugene Sue; poets, such as Lamartine; historians, such as Louis
Blanc and Jules Michelet. Republican thought was deeply impregnated
with socialism, and hence had a large working-class audience; political
emancipation was looked on as the means to social emancipation. Thus
the right to work, management of workshops by workers, and paying
out of profits to workers, all became part of the republican programme.
So powerful was the spread of socialist ideas that they worked their
way into the Napoleonic party through the book that Louis-Napoleon
wrote in his prison, /’ Extinction du Pauperisms, and also into certain
Catholic circles, by way of Lamennais and Buchez.
Catholicism itself, which before 1830 had paid court to authority
faithfully — not to say servilely — became the parent of a new opposition.
Immediately after the July revolution the government had alienated the
clergy by its hostile or scornful attitude towards religion. The reply
came from a little group of gifted young people, inspired by Lamennais.
Their paper, V Avenir, proclaimed their solidarity with the liberal
movements at home in France and abroad, and their will to set the
Church free from the State’s degrading hold on it. When Lamennais
was condemned by Rome, in 1832, his followers went on inspiring a
Catholic revival amongst the bourgeoisie. The clergy having accepted the
fait accompli of the new regime, the government treated them with
greater favour. This peaceful condition was broken towards 1840,
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when Catholics began to claim freedom of secondary and university
education, against the University’s monopoly. A real Catholic party
was formed, under the leadership of Charles de Montalembert, a peer of
France and a wonderful orator. This party caused the government
serious difficulty, and helped to turn away the moral support of Catholic
believers from it.
These currents of thought that stirred society barely penetrated
political life, restricted as it was by the constitution to the narrow circle
of the electorate and the two Chambers. Material interests and con-
flicting personal ambitions made up its day to day pattern. The story
has no grandeur in it; we can see three important matters only which
in turn dominated the sterile play of parties and ministerial groupings.
Immediately after the revolution it was the very survival of the regime,
and what line it should follow, that were in question; then, by the end of
1832, when the new monarchy had survived its early crisis and had
asserted its conservatism, the play of politics was dominated by the
king’s stubborn will to impose his own direction over the government.
Finally, after 1840, when Louis-Philippe had achieved his ends, the
question of reforming the regime crystallised the opposition’s efforts.
The first mi ni sterial team invested by the new king on 11 August 1830
reflected in its composition the diversity of the elements which had
brought the revolution into being. One section, that of the liberal
doctrinaire parliamentarians — Guizot, Mole, Broglie, Casimir Perier —
wanted to see in the revolution no more than a change of sovereign, per-
mitting a sincerer application of the system of the Charter; ‘return to
normalcy’ was their main pre-occupation. The others — Dupont de
l’Eure, Laffitte, Marshal Gerard — thought of the revolution as a point
of departure towards establishing a more democratic regime: ‘Evolve
the consequences of July’ was their watch-word. Resistance and
Movement were the names soon given to these two tendencies. All that this
first government could do was to gain time and set a limit to the damage,
making some concessions to public opinion, and also to replace civil
servants suspected of fidelity to Charles X. Louis-Philippe, taking an
active part, spent a good deal of his time in receiving delegations and
in making patriotic and soothing speeches.
At the end of October the men of the Resistance, declining any
longer to be associated with a policy of surrender, advised the king to
let the party of Movement show proof of its incapacity and misdoing.
This was the starting point of Jacques Laffitte’s ministry, on 28 November
1830. This important banker, weak, vain and longing for popularity,
practised ‘government by surrender’ as Armand Carrel put it. The
capital seemed to be given over daily to riot. In February 1831, acts of
popular violence were directed against the clergy: the church of Saint-
Germain l’Auxerrois, the palace of the Archbishop of Paris and other
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buildings were sacked; priests could no longer show themselves in the
streets. The foreign policy of the party of Movement, giving unwise
encouragement to liberal revolutions, was leading straight to war with
continental Europe, and this at a time when the army had barely any
organisation left.
In March 1831 public opinion was ripe for a change of policy, and
Louis-Philippe gave power to Casimir Perier. He typified the monied
bourgeoisie, loathing disorder, and he brought to the task of governing
a force of will-power and energy that was almost wildly passionate.
From his colleagues and all public servants he compelled unquestioning
obedience. Even the king himself must bend before this imperious
minister of his, and give up directly intervening in affairs. In the
Chamber, Casimir Perier announced as his programme: ‘At home,
order, without calling on liberty to make any sacrifices; abroad, peace,
with no cost to honour. . . . We hold that riots have no more the right
to force us into war than they have the right to push us into political
innovations.’ The remarkable thing is that he was able to succeed in
this programme, without recourse to exceptional measures, but simply
by regrouping around him the forces of the Resistance, and infusing his
own energy into the engine of State. And even whilst he was defend-
ing the regime against its enemies, both of the left and of the right, he
was at the same time getting the fundamental laws passed that in fact
shaped its structure. Perier’s government did not last much more than
a year, for he himself died on 16 May 1832, falling a victim to the
cholera epidemic that decimated the population of Paris. But in one
year he had put right a situation that had seemed past saving, had
averted European war, throttled anarchy and truly set the regime on
firm foundations.
Perier’s death was to leave the king a free field. In many respects he
was one of the most capable men who have ever occupied the throne.
He was bom in 1773 and had received an exceptionally good education
from the famous Madame de Genlis. With a widely cultivated mind
went exceedingly practical notions; he spoke four languages fluently,
and he could cook a meal too if need be; and even the cleverest of
business men had nothing to teach him about how to look after his
wealth. At the start of the Revolution he had belonged, like his father
Philippe-Egalite, to the Jacobin party. Luckily for him, his youth had
prevented him from taking part in the revolutionary assemblies, and he
had served the Republic as a soldier. For his own personal propaganda,
the fact that he was present at the battles of Valmy and Jemappes was
to prove an inexhaustible theme. Compromised with his chief
Dumouriez, he too in his turn had to go into exile: and he went through
hard times, for he was equally detested by the revolutionaries and by
those emigres who had stayed faithful to the Bourbons. A few years
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later he came back into favour with his cousins of the eldest branch of
the family, and married a daughter of the King of Naples — Marie-
Amelie, an excellent and pious woman. He had behaved with prudence
under the Restoration, being respectful to the sovereigns, who treated
him generously, and at the same time courting the liberal opposition,
who counted on him. At the age of fifty-seven he was a man full of
vigour, with features that rather called to mind Louis XIV, only with
long side-whiskers that were soon to be of legendary fame. In many
ways he was the incarnation of the faults and virtues of the bourgeois
class who had brought him to power: a family man, happy in the
midst of his many and handsome children; living modestly, and a
democrat in his manners; thrifty, to the point of avarice; naturally kin d
and good ; brave, too, in the face of physical danger. On the other hand,
he always preferred wily and temporising ways to those that were bold
and direct; he was a master at hiding what he thought under a flow of
genial talk; yet by deceiving everybody he was bound to lose the
respect and confidence of honest men. This opportunism and flexibility
concealed a determination to govern France. Under the restoration,
national representation had to struggle to free itself from the position
of dependence in which the constitution had placed it in relation to the
throne. After 1830 the situation was reversed: since the revolution had
confirmed the supremacy of the people, it was the king who must
struggle to secure his influence; in the framework of the revised con-
stitution this could only be won by equivocal methods, to which the
king’s character was only too well adapted.
His designs were served by the ambitious rivalries of the politicians,
and by the division within the great party of Resistance that Casimir
Perier had welded together. The Left Centre, inspired by Adolphe
Thiers, upheld the theory of parliamentary government on the English
model: ‘the king reigns and does not govern’. The Right Centre, with
the Doctrinaires and Guizot, were content with the constitutional system
of the restoration, which gave the king an active say in the government.
Between these two floated a hundred or so deputies — the ‘third party’,
whose only principle was to turn authority to their own account whilst
taking credit for criticising it. Later on there also appeared a ‘dynastic
Left’, which claimed to reconcile attachment to the king with part of
the republican programme. From the death of Casimir Perier (May
1832) up to October 1840 there were no less than ten successive
ministries. The most notable were those of the Due de Broglie (March
1835-February 1836) and Comte Mole (September 1836-March 1839).
The first was an unaccommodating doctrinaire, who declined merely to
carry out the king’s wishes and was for that reason dismissed by him.
The second, by contrast, was a perfect courtier, as docile as could be, and
was for that reason removed by a coalition of leaders of the Chamber.
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In the end, as a result of the foreign crisis of 1840, when Thiers’ lack
of prudence nearly made the eastern question provoke a European war,
a more lasting ministry was constituted. Marshal Soult was nominally
its president, but the real head of government was Guizot: he was in
fact minister of Foreign Affairs, and took the title of president of the
Council only in September 1847, when the aged marshal at last retired,
loaded with honours and greatly enriched. This ministry was to last as
long as the monarchy itself. Three main factors seem to have con-
tributed to its exceptional stability. First, the perfect understanding that
ruled between the king and his minister: Guizot had learnt the lesson of
experience, and had resigned himself once and for all to letting the king
exercise that share of influence which he expected in the government;
Guizot’s well-known strength of character removed all taint of servility
from his attitude. Secondly, the breaking up of the parties in the
Chamber, which made it possible for the government to secure a majority
by the granting of personal favours: Duchatel, minister of the Interior,
excelled in this, and hence was particularly entrusted with these dirty
jobs. And finally, Guizot’s own personality, then in its full strength of
talent ripened by experience. Few statesmen of the time possessed such
eminent qualifications: a magnificent mind, widely and deeply culti-
vated in history; a talent for oratory, characterised by a gift for raising
the level of the debates; courage, and a lofty idea of his mission. By
contrast, he had no notion of winning over public opinion, of which he
was contemptuous; and he irritated his opponents by obstinately re-
fusing to consider what might be of value in their aspirations. ‘The
duty of the government,’ he declared in 1847, ‘is to go slowly, and
wisely; to maintain, and to set bounds.’ Lamartine, the mouthpiece of
the new generation, had answered him: ‘Supposing that were the dis-
tinctive genius of a statesman charged with presiding over a govern-
ment, then we could do without a man — a boundary stone would do.’
This narrow conservatism, encouraged and shared by the king, was
to lead in the end to the downfall of the regime. At the end of the year
1846 the question of reforming the political institutions became the
common platform of the various opposition groups. Their demands
concerned two things: the corruption of the representative system by
the presence in the Chamber of civil servants whose votes were all too
manifestly controlled by the government; and the corruption of the
electoral system, enabling the government, by bribes or other means, to
sway as it wished the votes of an unduly restricted electorate. The
electoral law of 1831, by lowering the tax-qualification from 300 to 200
francs, had increased the electorate to the figure of 166,000; and since
then, by the mere fact of the growing wealth of the middle classes, the
figure had reached 241,000 (in 1846). But what was that in a country of
35 milli on souls ? One voter for every 75 male inhabitants.
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A proposal put forward by Thiers and others of the opposition at the
beginning of the 1847 session provided for the lowering of the tax-
qualification to 100 francs, and the granting of the right to vote —
without any means-test at all — to various classes of the people, simply
by virtue of their professions or their jobs. The effect would have been
to create about 200,000 new voters. Limited as this proposed reform
was, Guizot nevertheless had it thrown out by his loyal majority,
declaring that the nation wished only to live in peace and to prosper,
and that it would do harm to allow such sterile political agitation to
find its way down to the masses.
The opposition determined to try and shake the all too real indiffer-
ence of the country. As political meetings were forbidden by law, they
had the idea of falling back on a method that had been found effective
in England: the political banquet. Who could prevent honourable
citizens from assembling together in order to eat a little cold veal and
drink a bottle or two, even if it happened that speeches were made and
toasts given on such occasions? The banquet campaign started in
Paris in 1847, and then spread to the chief provincial towns; Lamartine
was the most sought-after speaker, also Ledru-Rollin the republican
lawyer. Although at the start the Republicans were only a minority on
the committees, they contrived nevertheless to turn the campaign into a
veritable attack on the regime as a whole. The campaign was helped by
the economic crisis that ravaged the country from the end of 1846. It
hit agriculture first; following a very bad harvest, the prices of food-
stuffs went up in a way that spelt catastrophe for the poorer classes.
Next, industry was short of capital, and lacked orders ; over-ambitious
schemes for building railways had to be stopped ; many industrial firms
turned away their workmen; there were nearly a million men out of
work.
The turning of public opinion against the government showed itself
even in parliament, as soon as the Chambers reassembled in 1848. In
the first debate, on the Address, one section of the conservatives voted
against the government, whose majority fell to 33. Guizot seemed to
be shaken. But the king, impervious to advice and blind to public
opinion, refused to contemplate the least change in his system: ‘There
will be no reform, I do not wish it. If the Chamber of Deputies votes for
it, I have the Chamber of Peers to throw it out. And just supposing
the Chamber of Peers votes in favour of it, there remains my veto’.
The opposition thought that the way to get the better of this obstinacy
was to frighten the king by fresh agitation. So it was decided to start
the banquet campaign again (it had stopped with the opening of the new
parliamentary session), and to do so in Paris itself. The revolution of
February 1848 was destined to spring from it.
As M. Charles Pouthas has very truly said of it, ‘Never was an
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event more unavoidable nor yet more accidental.’ Accidental, because
none of those who instigated the movement intended or hoped that the
regime would be overthrown; for in the past the government had
triumphed over much more dangerously organised attempts. Un-
avoidable, because the way in which the system set up in 1830 had
subsequently developed had in the end robbed it of any firm base at
all in the nation; not only was political life the arbitrary preserve of a
minority of privileged bourgeois, but — still worse — by cunning and
corruption the king had succeeded in also robbing even that minority
of any effective control of public affairs. There was too great a con-
tradiction between the system as it actually worked and the principle of
national sovereignty that lay at the basis of the regime. And finally
the very success of Louis-Philippe’s government contributed to its ruin;
for the order and stability which it had won for the nation led men to
forget those compelling reasons which had led them to accept the
usurpation of 1830: fear of revolutionary anarchy, and fear of war.
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GERMAN CONSTITUTIONAL AND SOCIAL
DEVELOPMENT, 1795-1830
B y the last decade of the eighteenth century, a national conscious-
ness had developed among educated people in Germany, ‘un-
sought and as if by accident,’ as Meinecke says, owing to the recent
outstanding achievements of German poets and thinkers, but it was a
cultural, not a political, nation to which this small minority of the
population felt itself to belong. As Goethe and Schiller expressed the
feeling of the intellectuals in their satirical Xenien (1796):
Germany? Where does it lie then? No map of mine seems to show it.
Where that of culture begins, there that of politics ends.
In the century just drawing to a close, the two outstanding features
in the history of Germany outside the Habsburg territories had been the
establishment by Frederick William I and Frederick the Great of
Brandenburg-Prussia as a centre of political power of European import-
ance, and the creation by a number of writers, mostly residing outside
Prussia, of a body of literature and philosophy that already made
nonsense of the earlier French assertion that no German could be a
man of wit, and that was to gain for Germany, after the inevitable time-
lag, a position of intellectual leadership in Europe. The way in which
these two new factors in German history, in origin almost entirely
separate, now helped and now hindered each other’s further growth, and
in which the ruling classes, in general obstinately conservative, reacted
under these and other influences to the events of the Revolutionary and
Napoleonic era, must be the main topics in any account of German
constitutional and social history between the Peace of Bale (1795) and
the French Revolution of July 1830.
The basis of German social and economic life remained in most
respects very much what it had been since the Thirty Years’ War and
even earlier. Germany was an agrarian country, where ‘status classes’
retained the distinctions that had grown up in the Middle Ages and were
now largely sanctified by law, and where a very large number of virtually
independent political authorities ruled territories varying greatly in
size, and treated the Holy Roman Empire, for all practical purposes, as
if it no longer existed. In the generation with which we are concerned
in this chapter, this amorphous country, with its many little centres of
culture but no single capital, began to take shape as a national state.
Vigorous as the intellectual life of the Germans undoubtedly was, their
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lethargy in political and social matters was so great that it needed the
invasion and occupation of much of the country by the French to rouse
their desire for national independence, and the determined efforts of
an able group of high officials in Prussia, stimulated by military defeat,
to initiate and carry through administrative and social reforms long
overdue in this most advanced of German states.
To begin with the peasantry, who made up more than three-quarters
of the population, a brief description is difficult, because conditions
varied so much in different geographical regions of the country, and
within the same region from one small political unit to another. To
English travellers at the beginning of this period, accustomed by now to
compact farms and the results of at least half a century of greatly
improved techniques, German agriculture seemed backward, almost
medieval, because of the great predominance of open-field cultivation,
with its scattered strips of holdings, its communal cropping routine, and
the consequent discouragement of individual effort to imitate more
advanced countries in introducing artificial grasses, improved crop
rotations and so on. As travellers went from west to east, they found
progressively worse cultivation and a more and more ignorant and
socially depressed peasantry, bound to the soil in virtual serfdom in the
eastern provinces of Prussia, and owing extensive, sometimes un-
limited, services to their Gutsherr, the lord of the manor, who had also
complete jurisdiction over his peasantry in his own court. In this
originally colonised land east of the Elbe, as also in Mecklenburg in the
north, estates were large and were worked mainly by the aristocratic
landlord himself, partly with the labour of his peasants and partly,
from an early date, with the paid labour of landless men.
In central Germany, and still more in the west and south-west, the
area of greatest political fragmentation, estates too were mostly made
up of small and scattered units, so that it had long been usual to
commute peasants’ services for money payments, but some relics of the
feudal system survived almost everywhere, although frequently con-
demned by enlightened opinion. In response to this humanitarian
pressure, to English example and to the theories of the physiocrats in
France, several states of the Empire abolished serfdom before Prussia.
It happened in Austria under Maria Theresa and Joseph II, in Baden
under Karl Friedrich, and in the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein,
following Denmark’s lead. Frederick the Great had at least protected
the rights of the Prussian peasantry to their inherited holdings, pre-
venting the enlargement at their expense of their lords’ estates by the
type of enclosure for which Mecklenburg was notorious. He had done
this however solely in the interest of his army, which relied mainly on a
healthy peasantry for its recruitment under the cantonal system. With
the same military aim in view, he had refrained from interfering with
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the privileges of the landed nobility, who furnished him with officers
and high civil servants. It was part of the understanding that had
gradually been worked out between the nobility and the crown, that if
they renounced many of the traditional rights of their class in relation
to the central government, and entered its service, as they had gradually
been compelled to do, they should at least be left complete masters of
their own estates and peasantry, free from land-tax and free from
government interference. Even after the French Revolution, the
peasantry in the east gave very little trouble to their landlords, whereas
on the Rhine they came to resent even their nominal subservience. It
was not pressure from below therefore that brought about reform in
Prussia, but the efforts of government officials and an enlightened
monarch, backed to a small extent by landowners who had learnt from
foreign experience that paid labour offered them better prospects of
efficiency and profit than the existing system.
The peasants were freed on the royal domains in Prussian territory,
both in Westphalia, where Freiherr vom Stein had much to do with it,
and in the eastern provinces, where over 50,000 of the superior class of
peasants who did service with their draft animals benefited from
Frederick William Ill’s reforming zeal before the battle of Jena, many
being given the hereditary right to their holding as well as personal
freedom.
Stein saw clearly, before Prussia’s downfall, that the small beginnings
thus made in the break-up of the old feudal order must be followed by
many further reforms if the country was to hold its own in the rapidly
changing world, but it was only the total defeat of 1806 that gave him his
chance for decisive action. Before that, the trading and industrial class
in the Prussian towns was almost as unenterprising and uncomplaining
as the peasantry. Germany had been dignified by the papal court.
Herder wrote in 1792, with the title of ‘the land of obedience’, and had
well deserved it. Though private enterprise had long been encouraged
by the state, which wanted a prosperous middle class that could be
heavily taxed, small-scale businesses on guild lines still greatly pre-
dominated, as they did all over Germany, and there were few, even in the
Prussian towns, who found anything wrong with the pre-capitalistic
ideals of a subsistence economy. Nor was there any evidence of a desire
for self-government in the towns. Even the so-called free towns of western
and south-western Germany were thoroughly undemocratic oligarchies,
while the Prussian towns submitted themselves passively to the direction
of the ever-watchful Local Commissary appointed by the government.
Very little was left of the old autonomy of the craft-guilds, prices being
largely controlled, for instance, by the military governor in the many
towns in which troops were permanently billeted, while apprentices
and domestic servants seeking a new situation had to present the
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‘ Employment Book ’ containing their whole history. The freedom of the
merchant and manufacturer was severely restricted in the interest of
the mercantilist policy inherited from Frederick’s day, all goods being
subject to excise when introduced into a town, and to import duties
at every state boundary. But merchants, shop-keepers, master-crafts-
men and their families were not, like their apprentices and the peasantry,
liable to be called up for military service, it being considered their
function to provide only the sinews of war.
Professional men of all kinds, civil servants, civic officials and
educated people generally in Prussian towns were also exempt from
military service, and from the burdens of active citizenship too, so that
civic government was left entirely to professional administrators and to
the selected tradesmen, shopkeepers and government nominees who
served on the town council. In the free towns of the Empire outside
Prussia, which were little republics, extending in most cases to a con-
siderable area beyond their walls, the position of a town councillor was
honourable and often lucrative, but he was almost always a member of
one of the small number of recognised patrician families. It was only
in Prussia that ‘noblesse’ carried the obligation to serve the state,
and this tradition had only been established by the two soldier-kings.
Elsewhere nobility conferred privileges without duties. The landed
aristocracy still included nearly all the wealthy, though many estates
were heavily mortgaged, and the careers open to younger sons were
severely restricted, as in France but not in England. In most states, the
higher court and civil service offices were reserved for the local nobility,
but a great many chose or were obliged to seek service outside, prefer-
ably in the army or civil service of one of the greater states, where
prospects were better than at home. The ecclesiastical states offered
special opportunities to Catholics, and Austria to imperial knights and
their sons, while Prussia was usually ready to employ men of outstand-
ing ability and energy, whether noblemen or commoners. The chief
Prussian ministers in the period of the great reforms, Stein, Hardenberg,
Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, were none of them Prussian by birth. The
young nobleman was made conscious of his privileged position from his
earliest years, never mixing with commoners at school, like his English
counterpart, but being educated privately, if he did not go to one of the
‘ Ritterschulen ’ reserved for his class. Besides being excluded from a
career in trade or industry, he was marked off from the generality, even
if he was a younger son, by his prefixed von, and usually he maintained
this aloofness jealously throughout life, unless he was moved, as some
eccentrics were, by the ideas of the Enlightenment and perhaps joined
the Freemasons, one of whose aims was to break down such barriers.
His social privileges were backed by important legal rights, for which it
would have been hard to find a rational justification. One of the most
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highly prized was exemption from the land-tax, the commonest form
of direct taxation, both in Prussia as we have seen and in most other
states. For peasants, this tax, together with the associated dues,
amounted in Prussia, round about 1800, to about 40 per cent of the net
yield of a man’s holding. No wonder that Goethe who, as the Duke of
Weimar’s favourite, took over for many years onerous official duties in
his little state; found that ‘the peasant always had to carry the sack’,
and compared him once to the green-fly which, when it has sucked
itself full on the rose-leaves, is preyed on in its turn by ants. ‘And it
has gone so far now,’ he added, ‘ that more is consumed in a day at the
top than is produced in a day at the bottom.’
It is surprising to find that, in the face of social disharmonies as
grave as these, there was not at least a persistent public protest on the
part of the intelligent minority of the German middle class, whose
education had familiarised them with the general movement of opinion
in Europe in the age of reason. In France, after abuses in many respects
no more intolerable had been satirised and philosophically analysed for
many decades, an attempt had finally been made to sweep them away
by the violent overthrow of the existing state. In Germany, Rousseau,
Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot and the ‘philosophes ’ had been read
with passionate interest, but the resulting criticism of society had
remained on the purely literary level, or had led to generalisations so
obviously out of touch with reality that no one took them seriously.
The ‘Storm and Stress’ movement in literature, beginning in the early
’seventies, had clearly been full of Rousseauistic feeling and, particularly
in the drama, had pilloried the inhumanity and injustice of many
features in the society of the day, hut the self-indulgent courtiers of the
Bishop of Bamberg in Goethe’s Gotz von Berlichingen (1773), or the
inconsiderate and narrow-minded aristocratic employers of Lenz’s
Private Tutor (1776), were new and original literary subjects, presented
as particular aspects of a richly varied world rather than as anachron-
isms calling for political and social action; and so it was with other less
striking writings of the movement, the poems and ballads, for instance,
in which the young Gottingen poets denounced tyranny and serfdom
and idealised the simple life. Lessing, the greatest of the rationalist
writers, made a much more effective protest than any of these in his
Emilia Galotti (1772), for no one could fail to take his ostensibly
Italian princelet, in this modernisation of the Virginia story, as a portrait
of a petty German despot, corrupted by power and flattery; but Lessing
intentionally avoided the directly political implications of his theme,
keeping his tragedy on the domestic level. A long series of domestic
dramas by lesser talents followed in the ’eighties and ’nineties, the
general tendency of which was to bring out the virtues of the middle
class in relief against the vices of the aristocracy. Schiller’s early plays,
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The Robbers and Cabal and Love, are superior versions of the same kind
of thing.
The best of these writers in their maturity, aiming at a more dis-
criminating public, which included aristocratic readers nurtured on
French literature and thought, were of course less one-sided, though
their sympathies were still middle-class. They continue the tradition of
the European Enlightenment in their pursuit of freedom from every
kind of prejudice, political, social or religious, trying always in their
serious work to present what they feel to be the essential and lasting
traits of humanity, the noble serenity that Winckelmann found in
Greek art, the ethical striving that Herder, in his Ideas for a Philosophy
of the History of Humanity, saw as characteristic of all the great
civilisations, in spite of the unique form assumed by each in response to
the particular conditions of its time and place.
Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, Goethe’s Iphigenie, Schiller’s Don Carlos,
products of the decade that saw the outbreak of the French Revolution,
are all in their different ways inspired by the same conviction, developed
from the Renaissance belief in man’s ability, unaided by supernatural
powers, to advance towards perfection, by the proper use of his in-
telligence and the conquest of his baser instincts. Reading them now,
however, we find them less universal than their authors imagined, for
what is most striking about these great writers is their extreme self-
consciousness and preoccupation with the inward. Originally religious
attitudes and emotions, often strongly influenced by pietism, have
become secularised in this rationalistic age but have remained un-
worldly, a concern for supernatural salvation turning, for instance, into a
passion for the things of the mind. In some the pursuit of Bildung, of
personal cultivation, is more ethical, in others more philosophical or
aesthetic, but at the root of it is always the conviction that the things
prized by ‘the world’ are far less important to a man than certain
states of mind, to which he can attain with a minimum of material aids.
Dilthey, summing up what seemed to him the chief characteristics
of German literature and thought between Lessing and Hegel, said that a
generation that felt the political and social world it lived in to be repellent
but unchangeable strove to make itself independent of the world by an
inward adjustment. Certainly, the German writers of the age of the
French Revolution who aimed at a direct effect on society could be
counted on the fingers of one hand. The most outspoken publicist,
Schlozer, was a professor at Gottingen, in the virtually neutral territory
of Hanover, attached to the English crown, and the Mosers, father and
son, had come from Wiirttemberg, the only state where some sort of
representative assembly had survived under an absolute regime. A
strict censorship, tightened up in Prussia and many other states after
the outbreak of the Revolution, made free comment on politics and
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religion impossible for most writers in any case — even a theatre critic
who seemed to Goethe persistently unfair was summarily expelled
from Weimar. The hypothetical and the fanciful were accordingly the
usual modes of utterance on topics that could be considered dangerous,
and it was exceptional for an author to think that his words might have
any effect on action.
It can readily be imagined that the news of the storming of the
Bastille and of the early debates of the National Assembly, like that of
the American War of Independence earlier, was greeted with enthusiasm
by a great many German writers, with their vaguely progressive sym-
pathies and openness to ideas that did not commit them personally. The
courts, on the other hand, and those closely in touch with them, like
Goethe, were alarmed and unsympathetic from the beginning. In
Weimar, Wieland and Herder held on to their early hopes until the
Terror and the execution of the king rallied almost all German opinion
to the side of the princes, for the great mass of the people were devoted
to their local dynasties, often with good cause. Despotism had become
genuinely benevolent in many small and medium-sized states; and in
Prussia, those who had liked Frederick least had to acknowledge his
courage, disinterestedness and efficiency, though all now enjoyed by
contrast the reduction, by his incompetent and self-indulgent successor,
Frederick William II, of the pressure formerly put upon them in the
interest of power.
With the accession of Frederick William III, in 1797, a positive
policy following that of Joseph II in Austria, aiming at public welfare
and the removal of restrictions on trade and industry, was adopted by
the king and his advisers in the Kabinett, Beyme and Minister Heinitz,
without any stimulus from public opinion. We have mentioned the chief
result, the freeing of the domain peasants. The king would have liked
to extend the reform to all the peasantry, but his plans had to be
abandoned, first because of the resistance of nearly all the landed
aristocracy, and then because the worsening international situation after
1803 gave him other things to think about. A few East Prussian land-
owners did however follow the king’s example. In spite of his free trade
ideas, now widely shared by influential officials, the king did not risk a
reversal of the traditionally mercantilist policy of Prussia, in the
peculiarly difficult economic situation created by the struggle between
France and England, nor did the Finance Commission set up in 1798
get further than discussing the abolition of the nobility’s immunity
from land-tax; but the privileged classes were at least made to pay duty
and excise at the new higher rates, instead of being partly exempt.
In October 1804 the king, apparently at the suggestion of Beyme,
strengthened the reform party among his ministers by making Freiherr
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vom Stein the member of the General Directory concerned with
taxation, customs and manufactures. Stein was an imperial knight from
the Rhinelands, who combined the desire to maintain the Empire, with
which his family had been intimately linked for hundreds of years, with
unswerving loyalty to the state created by Frederick the Great, which he
had served since 1780. His outstanding efficiency and energy had earned
for him in 1796 the post of senior president of all the Chambers through
which the province of Westphalia was administered for the Prussian
crown; but in the same year in which he was promoted to the central
government he had made his name known to the educated class all over
Germany as the champion of the fast vanishing class of imperial
knights, by an outspoken open letter to the Duke of Nassau-Usingen,
who had annexed some of the Steins’ ancestral possessions, as similar
lands were being taken over throughout south-west Germany and the
Rhinelands by the larger states, once the game of grab had started in
1803. Stein had already prudently sold most of his estates in the
Rhinelands and bought extensive properties in the south of Prussia, a
clear indication of his confidence in that state.
Stein was known to be a strong, even at times an intimidating per-
sonality. ‘What he loathed,’ says his friend Rehberg, ‘was indecision,
gossip and the glossing-over of unpleasant truths’ yet ‘he was always
ready to listen to objections, and to think again’. This born adminis-
trator was also a reading man, interested in economics and history,
certainly, rather than imaginative literature, but well aware of the
importance for the leader of men not only of firmness, but of the
capacity to take a broad, philosophical view of things, inspired by great
historical examples. The author he particularly recommended to Prince
Louis Ferdinand, the king’s brilliant but dissolute cousin, whom he
hoped to reform, was Plutarch. His best letters were written to Frau von
Berg, a friend of Herder and Jean Paul, steeped in Weimar humanism;
but when, after careful enquiry, he chose a wife, she was the daughter
of a Hanoverian general, a natural son of George II, a lady of sound
principles but also of a rank sufficiently high to satisfy the family
tradition. It was action, not contemplation, he lived for, and what he
most desired, he told Frau von Berg, was to remain, in spite of bitter
experience, active and tolerant.
From his student days in Gottingen Stein had greatly admired
England and English institutions, like his friends A. W. Rehberg and
Ernst Brandes, both of them Hanoverian officials and severe critics of
the French Revolution; Rehberg was the first German reviewer of
Burke’s Reflections in 1790, and Brandes a friend and admirer of Burke
some years before the Revolution. All three believed in an organic
society, the nation as ‘an idea of continuity which extends in time as
well as in numbers and in space’, but they were progressive con-
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servatives, not doctrinaire theorists like Adam Muller, the Romantic
publicist. Stein was intensely practical, with a very un-German distrust
of any political action based on abstractions, but with a good knowledge
of French political writings and complete readiness to learn from French
experience, much as he disliked what he considered to be their im-
morality and frivolity.
When Stein became a member of the General Directory in 1804, he
carried through with great energy several administrative reforms
initiated by the Finance Commission : a simplified ad mi nistration of the
salt monopoly, the abolition of some internal customs duties, the
establishment of a statistical bureau and the unification of the excise
offices with the ‘war and domains chambers’ in the provinces. He was
most anxious to move in the direction of policy-making on all levels of
government by full oral discussion. He wanted something like the
English cabinet, a council of responsible ministers, instead of the
existing system of personal government by the king and his intimate
non-ministerial advisers, the ‘Cabinet Councillors’. With Frederick the
Great these councillors had been no more than secretaries, but Frederick
William III, with not a tithe of Frederick’s ability and energy and with
a becoming diffidence, relied first on Mencken, then on Beyme, for
advice in every step he took, to the disgust of ministers like Harden-
berg, who remained merely departmental chiefs. As senior president
of the provincial Chambers in Westphalia from 1796 to 1804, Stein had
already tried to develop what little survived there of the older con-
stitution of the provincial estates. He was influenced in this not only
by Rehberg, but by the knowledge he had himself acquired at first hand
of English institutions during a six-months’ visit to England in 1786.
In his Nassau memorandum, written in retirement after his dismissal by
Frederick William III at the beginning of 1807, he developed these
ideas on self-government, putting forward as the great goal to be aimed
at ‘the revival of public spirit and civic feeling, the utilisation of
dormant or ill-directed efforts and uncoordinated sources of information,
harmony between the spirit of the nation, its opinions and needs, and
those of the civil service, and the stimulation of patriotism, independence
and national honour’.
The guiding principle of Prussian policy between the Peace of Bale
and the battle of Jena was the maintenance of peace, so that the re-
forms of the internal administration and the army, which the country’s
untimely exhaustion in 1795 had proved to be necessary, might be
carried through. New ways of increasing the country’s man-power were
considered, the cutting-down of exemptions under the cantonal system,
the formation of a militia, the relaxation of the inhuman discipline in
the army and the general acceptance of others than noblemen for com-
missions. But there was as yet no sense of urgency behind this reform
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movement. It was not easy to believe that Frederick’s well-proved
military machine had really lost its efficiency, and the king was inclined
to be too kind-hearted to the veterans in command. There was still a
great spirit of optimism abroad, though it was not shared by the king
himself. The French attache was told in 1799 by a high official that the
wholesome revolution which the French had carried through from below
would be accomplished in Prussia, by slow degrees, from above, for
the king himself was a democrat after his fashion, and was ceaselessly
working to reduce the privileges of the nobility, following with greater
caution the methods of Joseph II. In a few years there would no
longer be a privileged class in Prussia. It is true that the harm done by
the disastrous reign of Frederick William II had to some extent been
retrieved before Jena. The state debt had been reduced by nearly a
third, and seventeen million thalers had been put back into the empty
war treasury. But with taxes unchanged since Frederick’s time, the
emergency could not be met in spite of economies. Fortresses and
equipment were not maintained at their old pitch of efficiency, and the
troops were not even provided with winter greatcoats. It was becoming
manifestly impossible to run an army on the old lines, in an economic
and military situation that had radically changed. Staff work had least
of all kept up with the times, as was to be discovered when Frederician
tactics proved so hopelessly inadequate at Jena and Auerstedt against
Napoleon’s inspired energy in dealing with new situations.
After Prussia’s defeat, a strong group of high officials was bent on
immediate reforms, convinced as they were that far-reaching political
and social changes would be necessary to make Prussia capable of
competing with revolutionary France, where so much more of the
national potential could be made available to the common cause through
willing co-operation. The essential was, as Stein had realised long before
the crisis, that all classes should rally round the government, but until
many obvious social abuses had been swept away nothing of this kind
could be expected. As in the reforms initiated before Jena, the state
of the peasantry and of agriculture came in for consideration before
anything else. Before Stein himself returned as first minister (October
1807), good progress had been made by the government with plans for
the abolition of serfdom on private estates, hitherto strongly opposed
by most landowners. The owners of large estates in East Prussia, which
were well-suited to the new capitalistic methods of exploitation, did not
now require very much persuasion, for many were making ever increas-
ing use of landless labour. There had for some time been brisk dealings
in agricultural estates, many had changed hands, and the older patri-
monial relationship between landowner and peasantry had become
correspondingly rarer. Schrotter, provincial minister of East Prussia,
and Schon, Stein’s colleague, like many others in Konigsberg, now the
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seat of government, were full of the ideas of Adam Smith and believed
in giving private enterprise unlimited scope. That landlords should be
relieved of their obligations to their peasantry in time of need, in return
for the renunciation of their claims on them, seemed to them one of the
advantages of the abolition of serfdom. They even favoured a con-
siderable measure of enclosure of peasants’ land, if this step was co-
ordinated with the formation of large peasant holdings, four to eight
times the normal size, on an area equal to that enclosed. These were to
be free from services and to be held on hereditary tenure, leasehold or
freehold, with a view to the development of something like a yeoman
class. Stein himself gave his approval, intending to revise the scheme
in the light of experience. He boldly made the emancipation edict of
9 October 1807 apply to all the provinces left to Prussia by the Peace of
Tilsit, without consulting their Estates representatives. The provision
about enclosures was added in a supplement of 14 February 1808.
The main decree removed all existing restrictions on the sale of land, so
that landed estates hitherto reserved for the nobility could now be
acquired by middle-class or peasant purchasers, and conversely, the
nobility were now allowed to engage in industry and commerce. The
effect of this was to remove the legal basis for the existing class system,
with its sharply differentiated Stdnde, or status classes.
It was fully anticipated at the time that further decrees would follow
to complete the reform, but when Stein was forced by the French to
resign later in 1808, the remaining reformers were not strong enough to
face the collective self-interest of the landowners. The aim of social
justice, which had been at least part of the intention of those responsible
for the October edict, was in the end hardly furthered at all by this
measure, but the landlords were given freedom to move rapidly in the
direction of capitalism, once the difficult war period was over, and
provided with a new source of landless labour, through the inability of
many peasants to keep up the payments now required from them for
rent and so on, especially after the ‘Regulating Laws’ of 1816, which
were made entirely in the landlords’ interest. The decrees of 1807 and
1808 had indeed made the peasants on private estates, like those on the
royal domains earlier, direct subjects of the king, and no longer, as
hitherto, of their landlords as intermediate authorities who could
restrict their freedom of movement. In this sense these peasants had
been freed, but they had not been relieved, like the domain peasants,
from the services with which their land was burdened. A further step
was taken in 1811 (decree of 14 September), but it affected only the
superior class of peasants, and by a decree of 29 May 1816 they were
compelled to give up a large part of their land, in some cases one-third,
in others one-half, so that in the agricultural crisis of the 1820’s many
found themselves so seriously impoverished that they had to become
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landless labourers. The provision for the encouragement of larger
peasant holdings had, on the other hand, been a dead letter from the
beginning. Meanwhile the nobility retained their exemption from land-
tax (until 1861), their police authority (until 1872), their jurisdiction on
their estates and their game rights (until 1 848) and their church patronage
(into the twentieth century). Credit banks were set up for them from
about 1809, but the peasantry had to wait until 1849 before being given
similar assistance. In every respect, therefore, this part of Stem’s re-
forms represents a triumph for the individualistic tendencies of the
time. It worked in favour of the propertied class, however much it
might seem on the surface to be dictated by a humane regard for the
peasantry. The officials on the domains were the first to discover that
the obligations of a landlord to his peasantry had cost him far more
than their services had been worth to him. Strict accountancy soon
proved him, after the reforms, to be the gainer.
A second matter urgently in need of reform after Jena was the
organisation of the central government, which had been discussed
inconclusively before the war, and after it, at the end of 1806, had
become the subject of so heated a dispute, at a time when the country
was still in the greatest danger, that Stein felt himself obliged to resign,
instead of becoming foreign minister as the king wished. Stein made his
acceptance of the office conditional on the dismissal of Beyme, the
king’s all-powerful cabinet councillor. His resignation was accepted
and he was heaped with reproaches by the king. When he was persuaded
to return to the government, nine months later, he became first minister,
with direct access to the king, but Beyme was still there, and only the
queen’s urgent entreaty prevented another outburst on Stein’s part. He
was at least allowed to allot to Beyme duties which he considered suit-
able for him, until finally Beyme became President of the Kammergericht
in the following June. Meanwhile at least a provisional solution of the
constitutional problem had been found.
Hardenberg had been forced by the French to resign in the summer
of 1807; in September the king, then in Riga, received from him an
important programme of reform, worked out with the help of Alten-
stein and Niebuhr. Its leading idea was that Prussia must now resolve
to learn from her enemies, from revolutionary and Napoleonic France
alike, how to strengthen her government by the introduction of
democratic institutions, firmly controlled by the monarch. The king
had promptly set up two special committees, the ‘Immediate Com-
mission’, consisting mainly of former members of the General Directory
like Schon, Altenstein and Niebuhr, to deal with the reform of the civil
service, and the ‘Military Reorganisation Commission’, headed by
Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. Stein returned with a complete scheme
that he had sketched for the reform of the principal government
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departments and their procedure, and he soon obtained the king’s
approval of it in principle, though he had to agree to the postponement
of its introduction until French evacuation of occupied Prussian
territory made it financially possible.
Instead of three boards, collectively responsible in the traditional way,
one for foreign affairs (the ‘Cabinet Ministry’), one for Church affairs
and justice, and one for general administration (the General Directory,
with its mingled provincial and specialist departments), Stein wanted a
logical set of five ministries, for finance, home affairs, foreign affairs,
war and justice, the same five that existed in France. The work of the
five ministers in charge of them was to be co-ordinated by a Council of
State, on which they were to be joined by several additional privy
councillors, and over which the king would preside. The mi ni stries were
duly created, though initially the first two were combined under Stein
himself, but the idea of a Council of State did not meet with the king’s
approval, chiefly because he did not feel capable of acting as its chair-
man. Hardenberg, for a month or two before he departed from office,
had acted as a kind of prime minister and in some measure, with the
collaboration of the king and Beyme, harmonised the decisions of the
various boards. Stein had to be content with a s imi lar make-shift
arrangement, and it was continued again when Hardenberg came back
as his successor, until in 1810 the king accepted Hardenberg’s sug-
gestion that he should be styled ‘State Chancellor’ and recognised as
the head of the government, representing the ministers in their relations
with the king, or at any rate controlling those relations. Stein was at
least able to break down the old practice of exclusively written com-
munications between departments, by holding weekly conferences with
his fellow-ministers, and the king ceased to rule in the traditional
arbitrary manner from his cabinet because he recognised his personal
deficiencies. When Hardenberg became state chancellor, he remained
the opportunist he had always been and, on encountering opposition
from the nobility, returned more and more to bureaucratic methods of
government, having more confidence in his own diplomatic adroitness
than in the democratic principles dear to Stein. He successfully resisted
Wilhelm von Humboldt’s efforts, after the Congress of Vienna, to
introduce some degree of ministerial responsibility into the constitution,
and retained his full authority until his death. From Humboldt’s
letters we gain a very similar impression of Hardenberg to that con-
veyed by Stein’s description of him in his memoirs:
Hardenberg had the good-humoured affability found in sanguine, pleasure-loving
natures, he had a quick intelligence, a capacity for work and a pleasing exterior.
But his character had no moral, religious foundations, it lacked greatness, drive and
firmness, his understanding lacked depth, his knowledge thoroughness. Hence
his weakness, his over-confidence in prosperity, his w hinin g in adversity, his
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superficiality, defects which under the influence of his sensuality, pride, and insincerity
did so much harm. ... He did not aim at the great and good for its own sake, but
for the glory it might bring him. He therefore misunderstood it, never attained to it,
and passed away neither respected nor lamented.
Stein’s views found their fullest but still only partial realisation in the
Municipal Reform Edict of 19 November 1808. He was not, like
Hardenberg, Schon and Altenstein, an advocate of social and economic
laisser-faire. His decidedly idealised notion of the long-vanished pro-
vincial estates system, and the perhaps over-favourable picture that he
had formed for himself of English self-government, led him to seek the
natural basis of a well-organised society in a system of corporations,
not in uncontrolled private enterprise. The citizen should not be
ordered about and prevented from expressing his own opinion by a
remote central authority, but he should have his roots in a local com-
munity and share the self-governing activities in the first place of an
organised regional group which, in its turn, through a hierarchy of
district and provincial bodies, might indirectly influence the central
government.
The Municipal Reform Edict made each town responsible for the
whole of its own general administration, instead of its having to leave
the initiative and the last word in all important matters to the Local
Commissary, the government representative. Only the police force and
courts of justice were withdrawn from civic control, the maintenance of
law and order being still regarded as one of the functions of the central
government, though for convenience it might leave the control of the
police in quite small towns to the town council. The active citizens in
the various wards into which the town was divided were to elect a
Council of Deputies, and this in its turn the Executive Town Council.
A man still did not need to become an active citizen unless he wished to
buy a house and land or to practise a trade in a town. If, like most
residents, he rented rooms in someone else’s house, he remained a ‘legal
citizen’ ( Schutzbiirger ), with neither the rights nor the duties of active
citizenship, which no one particularly wanted. ‘The people were
commanded, not allowed, to govern themselves’ (Seeley), and even the
new Town Councils consisted mainly of shopkeepers and tradesmen.
Of the active citizens only the poorest, those with an income below 150
(or in larger towns 200) thalers a year, the pay of an apprentice, were
debarred from voting or being candidates in the election of the Council
of Deputies.
Frederick the Great had tried, without very great success, to en-
courage individual enterprise in certain industries which seemed to suit
his purpose of making Prussia less dependent on imports and in-
creasing her taxable income; but the traditional guild form of industry
still prevailed here, as in the rest of Germany, and those who wished to
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practise any handicraft had to join the appropriate guild, with its often
fantastically elaborate regulations. It had been part of Stein’s purpose
to do away with this compulsion, but for the moment it was only
possible to establish freer forms of business in the case of butchers and
bakers, and to abolish another medieval monopoly, the compulsion
resting on certain tenants to have their com ground at particular mills,
the ‘milling soke’ familiar to students of the English manorial system.
The principle of free enterprise was however recognised in the
Memorandum of 16 December 1808, and Hardenberg later followed
this up with the Edict of 2 November 1810 and the Industrial Law of
7 September 1811, introducing the full French system. Anyone was
now free to practise a trade who had paid a certain fee and obtained a
permit (the Gewerbescheiri) from the government, which continued to
exercise supervision only over callings such as that of an apothecary
(and a chimney-sweep !), where public welfare seemed to require it. The
guilds persisted as voluntary associations, and in the new territory
acquired by Prussia in 1815 the old industrial system was allowed to
continue, as it did in most other German states. A more or less uniform
system of free enterprise was not introduced even into Prussia until
1845. Stein had also wished to abolish the sharp distinction made
between town and country in their economic functions and forms of
administration, involving the restriction of industrial production to the
towns. As a first step he would have had to do away with the excise,
the tax levied on the towns exclusively, and to find a substitute for it, an
impossible task at a time when money was urgently required by the
government for war contributions. An experiment with an income tax
on the English model in East Prussia was short-lived and was not
repeated.
The provincial organs of government were reorganised by a decree of
26 December 1808, after Stein’s departure, on lines approved by him.
No fundamental changes were made in them, and the War and Domains
Chambers, now given the name of Governments, retained most of their
old functions. The principle of the separation of justice and adminis-
tration was however carried through systematically here too, the
administrative bodies losing the right of jurisdiction they had had where
questions of state finance or police were involved. The name Govern-
ment had formerly been given, in the Prussian provinces, as in most
German states at that time, to the Departments of Justice. They were
now called Supreme Provincial Courts, and these courts handed over to
the provincial Governments their earlier administrative functions in
ecclesiastical and educational matters and questions concerning
sovereign rights. The work of the Governments was for the first time
divided logically among specialised sections, but the principle of cor-
porate responsibility was retained, and the President of the Government
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was not appointed to be a dictator, but a chairman. The extent to which
laisser-faire ideas had replaced the old mercantilism comes out in the
standing instructions provided for his guidance, with their insistence
on the minimum of government interference with free enterprise.
Stein’s suggestion that laymen, representing various classes, should be
given a share in the administration, working in committees alongside
permanent officials, was given a short trial in Brandenburg and Prussia,
but the practice was soon abandoned.
The abolition of so many privileges of the aristocracy had a direct
effect on the Prussian army, which under the soldier kings had exactly
reflected, in its social structure, that of rural Prussia, the nobility pro-
viding its officers and the peasantry most of the rank and file, so that
men often found themselves, in the army, still under the control of a
young squire they had known from their boyhood. When the barriers
between the social classes were breached, as they were particularly by
the Stddteordnung (Municipal Reform Edict), the reform of the army
then proceeding had to take account of this important new factor. Stein
as First Minister supervised both the civil and the military reforms and
gave his full support to the radical ideas of Scharnhorst, the regular
chairman of the Military Reorganisation Commission at the vital stage.
Reform was facilitated by the resignation of many of the senior
officers after the Peace of Tilsit and the drastic reduction of the army, a
maximum of 42,000 men being eventually allowed by the French. The
Commission’s attention had been directed by the king to three points in
particular, the selection of officers, the abolition of recruiting outside
Prussia and the revision of the system of military punishments. Scharn-
horst, who owed to his own ability his rise to high rank in the artillery,
first in Hanover and then in Prussia, wanted to see commissions in the
new army awarded solely on grounds of merit, to men of character and
a reasonable standard of education in peace-time, and of courage and
resourcefulness in war. After much discussion he had his way. No
distinction of birth was now made between candidates, and all had to
pass the same examination, though a good deal of discretion was left
to the company commander in the degree of importance he attached
to the qualities expected of a gentleman, when aspirants came before
him for interview. A decree of 6 August 1808 proclaimed these new
principles.
It took Scharnhorst a great deal longer to introduce the form of
recruitment that he desired from the outset as the only possible basis
for a national rising, namely national service after the French model,
to which the king only agreed early in 1813, when he had rejected the
proposal three times. The old Prussian army had been recruited partly
by the cantonal system in its own territory, partly by recruiting cam-
paigns in any of the neighbouring states that permitted them, more
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than half the men being found in this way. Recent political changes due
to the Napoleonic war had closed the best recruiting grounds by the
time the Commission began its deliberations, and the furlough system
( Kriimper system) was first devised as a remedy for the reduction in the
available man-power, before a limitation of numbers was imposed by
the French. In every company, men were sent home each month as
reservists and replaced by others recruited in the usual way by the
cantonal system, and these were succeeded after a month’s training by
another batch, so that the army, while retaining a solid basis of long-
service men, provided a continual stream of men with a rudimentary
training, though its numbers never exceeded the total permitted, when a
maximum came to be fixed.
As a preparation for calling up others than the peasants and
apprentices who, with foreign riff-raff, had served in the ranks of the
old army, it was necessary as a first step to improve conditions of ser-
vice. One of the perennial problems of the Prussian army in time of war
had been to make desertion as difficult as possible. A body of men, the
majority of whom were ‘foreigners’, persuaded to join up in a weak
moment, and the rest pressed men with scarcely any motive for fighting
except fear of their officers, had to be drilled into an obedient mass, and
discipline had to be enforced by ‘running the gauntlet’ and other
corporal punishments of the harshest kind. If the privileged and the
under-privileged classes were to be conscripted for army service side by
side, they would clearly have to be treated much more humanely, a
reform that was in any case demanded by the spirit of the times. In
spite of strong protest by officers of the old school, an order embody-
ing this reform was proclaimed on 3 August 1B08. In March of this
year Schamhorst had already submitted to the Commission a draft
report recommending the establishment of ‘provincial troops’, a kind of
militia, intended for the previously exempted classes, from whom he
proposed to call up all fit men between the ages of 19 and 31. His ideas
were strongly opposed even by some of the most patriotic among the
higher officials, because of the harm that would be done, in their
opinion, to the economic and cultural life of Prussia. Even apart from
this, the king could not have given his assent, because of the negotia-
tions then taking place with the French about the withdrawal of their
occupation forces. A Convention agreed upon with them on 8 September
1808 expressly forbade the setting up of a militia.
French military pressure had to be relaxed at the end of 1808, because
Napoleon needed his troops so badly elsewhere, but Prussia would not
join Austria in an attempt at revolt in 1809, in spite of the Spanish rising
and signs of resistance to Napoleon on many sides; and again Frederick
William rejected a report proposing conscription, which was submitted
by a special committee appointed in June 1809. In addition to Scham-
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horst’s earlier proposals, revised to meet some criticisms, the plan
provided for special detachments of mounted volunteers from the
upper classes — the germ of what were known later as the Freikorps in
the War of Liberation, like the Liitzow Chasseurs, with whom Theodore
Komer served and fell. In July 1809 came the Austrian defeat at
Wagram.
In the next three years a further batch of reforms was carried through,
including the far-reaching overhaul of the educational system, in spite
of the heavy financial burden of the war contribution, with the instal-
ments of which Prussia was always in arrears. The First Minister was
now again Hardenberg, recalled in June 1810 at Queen Luise’s sug-
gestion, just before her death, and he remained in office until his own
death in 1822. In 18 11 the patriotic group of generals and high officials
for a third time urged the king to break with Napoleon, foreseeing that
war between France and Russia was imminent, but he still cautiously
refused to move without the support of both Austria and Russia, and
Austria under Metternich would not risk another defeat. In the spring
of 1812 Prussia had even to promise Napoleon 20,000 men for his
Russian campaign. This corps, finally commanded by General Yorck,
operated in the Baltic provinces and did not take part in the advance to
Moscow and the disastrous retreat. It was only the catastrophe that
overtook the French in Russia in the winter of 1812, and General
Yorck’s bold decision, without consulting his government, to conclude
the Convention of Tauroggen (30 December 1812) with Russia, and to
carry on with his plans even when the king rejected the Convention
and relieved him of his command, that finally forced the king’s hand.
Stein, now political adviser to the Russian emperor, came to Konigs-
berg as his envoy, and Yorck and he organised from there the prepara-
tion of a rising against Napoleon, supported by the nobility of East and
West Prussia. They decided to raise a Landwehr or militia of 20,000
men by conscription and to finance it locally with this aristocratic
backing.
Now at last it was possible for Scharnhorst to execute his long-
cherished plans. The calling up of the Krumper had the effect of trebling
the standing army. On 3 February 1813 an appeal was made for the
formation of detachments of volunteer chasseurs. On 9 February all
exemptions in the existing regulations for the cantonal system were
cancelled; this meant total conscription, and 12 February was fixed
as the date of mobilisation. The concession which it had been found
necessary to make in the East Prussian call-up was now abolished,
namely that of allowing men to provide substitutes to serve in their place,
a last relic of privilege allowed even in France.
In the long story of the preparation of the finally successful rising of
Prussia against Napoleon, the diplomatic and military aspects of which
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must here be passed over, there is nothing that can be called heroic
about the actions of the king himself, though some historians have
maintained that in the end his prudent policy justified itself, and that an
earlier rising would have been doomed to failure. It was constitutional
inability to make an irrevocable decision, especially one involving a risk
to his dynasty, that lay behind the king’s inactivity, for Frederick
William could only think as a Prussian, while most of the patriots, in-
cluding his queen, thought by now as Germans, eager out of self-respect
as a nation to assert their independence, even if Prussia’s individual
interests might for a time be seriously endangered.
With regard to this sentiment of national self-respect, it is certain
that a great change had taken place in Germany since 1795. One obvious
cause is the mere fact of large-scale invasion, and the disorganisation and
suffering it brought with it. But when Germany had been invaded
before, or when foreign powers had used its soil as a battle-field, few if
any Germans had had this sense of national outrage, because until about
1800 it was rare indeed for any of them to think of ‘Germany’ as a
fatherland at all, rather than his own little state with its historic dynasty.
The new factor, it seems, is the sense of national identity, which had
come into existence, in the minds of cultivated people, through the
emergence of a new culture, valued as something specifically German,
not provincial. It was in the main a literary and philosophical culture, a
creation in language, the unified literary language gradually fashioned
for this purpose by a series of gifted writers, from the local vernaculars
still used everywhere in the family circle and among intimate friends, as
Swiss German is today. It is true that pride in native achievements was
modified, in many of the most distinguished writers, by a continuing
allegiance to humanity as the only object worthy of the highest esteem,
and there is a large component of cosmopolitanism in the nationalism
even of a Fichte. He and many of his Romantic contemporaries saw
Germany as predestined to lead mankind in general towards the highest
ideals. Inherent in this attitude, we see now, was the danger of a lack of
consideration for other national cultures, occasionally evident already
in an over-confident assertion of German merits. But without this
inspiration of a universal ideal, it seems clear, the great reformers of
Prussia, Stein and Humboldt in particular, would not have devoted
themselves to their tasks as they did.
While the administrative and military reforms aimed above all at the
creation of a new spirit in the Prussian people, the reform most directly
calculated to have this effect was that of the educational system
(Chapter VII, pp. 193-6). It was vigorously tackled, with far-reaching
results, in the dark years following the defeat of Austria, in spite of
acute financial and political difficulties. Before his resignation in 1808
Stein himself had recommended to the king the appointment of Wilhelm
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von Humboldt as head of the section in the Ministry of Home Affairs
responsible for the Church and Education, a surprising choice but a very
good one. Wilhelm, the elder of the two highly gifted Humboldt
brothers, early came into contact with the intellectual revival, through
Jewish circles in Berlin; and at 25, after marrying a like-minded and
equally well-to-do wife and leaving the civil service, in order to live
wholly, with her, for the full development of their inner powers, had
written the essay on the limi tation of the powers of the state which is
one of the classics of liberalism. He had lived for a year or two in Jena,
in the closest association with Schiller and Goethe, spent some years in
Paris and finally obtained a virtual sinecure in the Prussian diplomatic
service in Rome, for the pleasure and stimulus of living there. Of schools
he knew nothing at first hand, having been privately educated, and he
was so indifferent to religion that he left church affairs entirely to his
assistant Nicolovius, Goethe’s nephew. He had studied however. at
Frankfurt and Gottingen, known Heyne and Wolf and himself trans-
lated from the Greek, and was an even more ardent humanist and
apostle of culture than his Weimar friends. During his brief tenure of
office, from March 1809 to June 1810, he left the mark of his personality
on the whole school and university system of Prussia, and later of
Germany.
Fichte, in his Addresses to the German Nation, public lectures delivered
in occupied Berlin to large audiences in the winter of 1807-8, had laid
the greatest stress, in his plea for national self-renewal, on the necessity
for an educational system which should produce self-reliant men of all
classes, religiously devoted to their country as the only lasting reality,
and he had warmly praised Pestalozzi and his work in Switzerland.
Humboldt and his staff worked out plans for a compulsory elementary
educational system on modified Pestalozzian lines, and for training-
schools for teachers. Humboldt personally had more to do with the
improvement of the grammar schools, which he naturally favoured as
against the modem schools ( Realschulen ) beloved of the Enlightenment
with their emphasis on useful knowledge. His Gymnasien were to train
the minds of their pupils through the intensive study of Latin, Greek
and mathematics, and to provide for general culture through a wide
range of subsidiary subjects. The system was only fully worked out
under Siivem, after Humboldt’s departure. It proved most successful
and became the model for the whole of Germany. As early as 1812 a
school leaving examination was instituted, the passing of which
qualified a boy (girls were not yet provided for) to enter a university.
Humboldt’s finest achievement was his planning and staffing of the
new university set up in Berlin, in close association with the existing
Academy of Sciences, to take the place of Halle, now in occupied
territory. It opened in 1810, soon after Humboldt had left Berlin to
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become Prussian ambassador in Vienna. Like Newman later, Hum-
boldt held it to be the function of a university not merely to transmit
knowledge, but to train and develop the intelligence, judgment and
moral resources of the student, so that he should be capable of acquir-
ing quickly the special knowledge or skill required for any profession,
and approach his life’s work with a philosophy behind him. In agree-
ment with the distinguished scholars, Fichte, Schleiermacher, Niebuhr,
Savigny and others, whom he selected as its first staff, he gave this
model German university its characteristic emphasis on the search for
new knowledge; and, though it was never possible for all professors and
students to live up to these high ideals and it became increasingly
difficult as time went on, great things were accomplished and a new
conception of university education was introduced to the world.
(Chapter V, pp. 127-8). Berlin was also, however, in spite of the ‘freedom
to teach and to learn’ of which it boasted, almost entirely dependent
financially on the state, and unlike the Academy did not enjoy autonomy
in adding to its staff.
Knowing as we do now the part played by Prussia in German history
since the Napoleonic Wars, we are bound to attach more importance
to the social and constitutional changes that took place there during
the wars than to those experienced in other parts of Germany, but for
contemporaries the picture was different. The Empire itself soon proved
powerless to stand up to the shocks resulting from the French Revolu-
tion and its consequences. The first attack of Custine’s army in 1792
showed how helpless the small states of south-west Germany were in
such a crisis, although for the moment they were saved by the armies
of Prussia and Austria. Prussia was soon preoccupied with events in
Poland, where Russia and Austria were bringing about a third partition,
in which they aimed at relinquishing as little territory as possible to
her. When Prussia hastily withdrew from the struggle with France and
concluded in 1795 the Peace of Bale, Germany north of the Main was
left to enjoy an uneasy respite for a decade. It was in these years that
Goethe and Schiller in Weimar and Jena produced the classical works in
which they consciously aimed, as Schiller put it in 1 794 (announcing their
new literary periodical, Die Horen), at ‘restoring to men their freedom
of mind, and uniting the politically divided world under the banner of
truth and beauty, by cultivating a general and higher interest in what is
purely human and superior to contemporary influences’.
Weimar was one of the small Saxon duchies in central Germany, and
Electoral Saxony too, the fourth in size of the German states before the
Revolution, was chiefly important down to the end of the wars for
achievements in industry and the arts. The handsome Saxon capital,
Dresden, with the finest art collections outside Vienna, inspired many
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romantic writings; Leipzig continued to be the centre of the book-
trade; the Freiberg Academy of Mining , founded in 1765, contributed
more to the advancement of natural science than any German university
in this period; and an Academy of Forestry, the first in Germany, was
opened at Tharandt as late as 1811. The strong practical bent revealed
in such institutions was also in evidence in a number of small-scale but,
for that age, highly-developed industries. In a Prussian enclave in
Saxony the first steam-engine in Germany was to be seen from 1785 near
Merseburg, pumping water from a mine. But even in this favoured
region modem forms of industry made slow progress, severely hampered
by poor communications and guild controls, and until long after 1830
there were few signs of capitalism in Germany generally, except in the
form of domestic industries, producing textiles in particular, in villages
on the poor soil of upland districts like parts of Saxony and Silesia,
where people were in special need of such part-time occupations.
After Prussia’s withdrawal, Austria continued the struggle in 1795 and
1796 with some success, though Baden and Wiirttemberg were soon
compelled to abandon the Coalition and to pay tribute to France. In
1797 Austria too, after Napoleon’s defeat of her forces in Italy, con-
cluded with him the Peace of Campo Formio, in the secret clauses of
which she already gave her assent to an eventual annexation by France
of the left bank of the Rhine. France’s demand was made openly at
the Congress of Rastatt in the following year and finally accepted by the
large deputation representing the Imperial Diet. A plan was already
contemplated to compensate German princes for the loss of territory
consequent on this annexation by the secularisation of ecclesiastical
lands on the right bank of the Rhine; but, when hostilities were soon
resumed, this plan could not be carried through until the Peace of
Luneville (February 1801) brought the War of the Second Coalition to
an end.
Far-reaching changes in the life of south-west Germany in particular
were initiated by the shameless bargaining which now took place
between German princes great and small and the French Foreign
Minister, Talleyrand, at the cost of the last supporters of the imperial
idea, the ecclesiastical princes, the free towns and the imperial knights.
It suited the strategic requirements of France, in her fear of Austria, to
set up puppet states in south Germany; and Bavaria, Wiirttemberg,
Baden and Hesse-Darmstadt welcomed the opportunity thus opened to
them of territorial aggrandisement. In vain an attempt was made, in the
settlement agreed to by the Deputation of the Imperial Diet on 25
February 1803, to rescue parts of the old imperial constitution. When
the south German states were compelled in the war of 1805 to take the
French side, the Empire itself virtually ceased to exist. The last of the
south German free towns, the imperial knights and a large number of
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counts were mediatised, and their lands swelled still further the territory
of Bavaria and the other compliant states, which were now declared
sovereign powers. They joined the Confederation of the Rhine on 12
July 1806, accepting French protection and renouncing imperial titles.
A month later Francis II renounced his elective imperial title, and so
became Francis I, Emperor of Austria. The territorial changes thus
brought about, involving an enormous reduction in the number of
separate states in Germany, were comparatively little affected by the
peace of 1815, by which the three hundred or more separate territories
that could be distinguished in the older Germany were reduced to thirty-
nine states. It was the French occupation that called into being every-
where in Germany the new kind of national feeling, political and not
merely cultural, of which we have described the emergence above. The
desire for a unified nation began to make itself felt, in rivalry with that
of each state to maintain its separate identity. The ideas of the revolu-
tionary age moreover aroused the demand in all states for constitutions
and the blurring of class privileges.
While the Confederation of the Rhine was in existence and important
reforms were being carried through in Prussia, many constitutional and
social changes took place in the remaining German states, but most of
them proved to be temporary, while the states which retained their old
boundaries, such as Saxony (now a kingdom), Mecklenburg and the
north German small states, were hardly affected at all. As a result of the
protracted occupation, French law and the French system of administra-
tion took root so firmly in the states on the left bank of the Rhine that
their effects were felt long after 1815, the Code Napoleon remaining in
force until 1900. In the new states created by Napoleon — Westphalia,
Berg and Frankfurt — though many reforms were initiated in accordance
with French ideas, few were completed and it was possible to make a
fresh start after the peace. On the other hand, in the greatly expanded
purely German states of the south and south-west, Bavaria and the rest,
the process of expansion itself necessitated far-reaching changes in
administration, because of the heterogeneous nature of the territories
absorbed. Napoleonic France was taken as a model in the working out
of a completely centralised and rational absolutism.
Although it was not many years before Napoleon’s Empire crumbled,
he not only in that time transformed the political map of Germany, but
through his vassal kings and their statesmen introduced into Germany
by a revolution from above the chief political and administrative
practices which, in France, were the final result of a democratic mass
movement from below, when an organiser of genius had so canalised
popular forces that they served to bolster up his own authority. These
ideas were willingly accepted by German rulers, because the French
political system under Napoleon had only carried to their logical
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conclusion aims already pursued by Frederick the Great and other en-
lightened despots. Combined with them German rulers now took over
other political and social ideas of a truly revolutionary novelty, ideas
which were not consistent with the continuance of the hitherto un-
questioned privileges of the nobility and the church. The normal
conservative citizen was bewildered by these ideas, and their final result
was often not decided for decades, but it soon became clear that the
old regime could no more be restored in Germany than in France.
On the face of it, the governments responsible for these reforms in the
south German states differed from each other greatly and had very
different historical traditions and local circumstances to contend with,
yet the same broad current bore them along. In Bavaria, some opposi-
tion to the dominant Catholic priesthood had been attempted since the
middle of the eighteenth century by admirers of the intellectual achieve-
ments of the Protestant north. With the support of the Elector Max
Joseph a Bavarian Academy of Sciences had been established in 1759,
with the aim of encouraging the spread of useful knowledge in the
general interests of the community, and of fighting the all too prevalent
superstition and sloth. Original research was a min or aspect of its
activity while Bavaria lagged so far behind the north in literacy and
enlightenment. Under the pleasure-loving Karl Theodor (1777-99)
the Academy suffered a setback, although it was allowed to take over the
buildings of the Jesuit College in Munich when the Order was suspended
in 1783. The French Revolution brought a violent reaction against
enlightenment in any shape, but Elector Max Joseph II, on his
accession in 1799, gave a completely free hand to his foreign minister,
Maximilian von Montgelas, who had left Bavaria in 1785 to escape
arrest as a member of the secret society of the Illuminati, and had been
associated for years, in exile, with the future elector. Always an
admirer of French radical thought, he needed no persuasion from the
French to set about the task of reforming Bavaria’s finances, administra-
tion and intellectual life. By harsh and sometimes ill-considered
measures he attempted in great haste to subordinate the ecclesiastical to
the civil power, to secularise the monasteries and to build up a modern
civil service. To help in these tasks he called in leading Protestant
scholars, Anselm Feuerbach to reform the law, F. H. Jacobi and F. W.
Thiersch to strengthen the Academy, and Schelling, Niethammer and
Savigny to set an example in the universities, while Hegel was made
Rector of the Niimberg Gymnasium.
In a similar way Sigismund von Reitzenstein in Baden combined a
policy of territorial expansion, by French favour and at the expense of a
large number of weaker German states, with vigorous measures on
French lines to modernise the administration of the resulting amalgam.
Exploiting Napoleon’s wish to ensure ready access for French forces to
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southern Germany, Baden was able to extend her boundaries until they
took in the whole bank of the upper Rhine; and the good Karl Friedrich,
when he died as Grand Duke in 181 1 at the age of 83, ruled over nearly
ten times the area that he had inherited as Margrave in 1738. Here
also much care was given to the improvement of schools and universities.
Heidelberg, acquired by Baden only in 1803, in a state of extreme
decline, was completely re-established and only now became one of the
leading German universities and a centre of the later romantic move-
ment.
In Wurttemberg Frederick I, who became Duke in 1797 as a middle-
aged man, much travelled and full of confidence in his own abilities,
was determined to share his late-won power with no one. A sullen,
dissolute, pot-bellied tyrant, he revived the worst traditions of his
grandfather Karl Eugen, his extravagance, his love of pomp and
ceremony and of the mass slaughter that was called hunting, and his
total disregard for the modest representative institutions and the inde-
pendent church which were so dear to his Swabian subjects. The new
acquisitions of 1803 were called ‘New Wurttemberg’ and treated by
him like a conquered country; and, when in 1806 Napoleon made him a
king, he suspended after a struggle with the Estates what was left of
their old constitution and demanded unconditional obedience from all
alike. The well organised Lutheran church had over the centuries won
for itself a considerable measure of independence, and acquired ex-
tensive funds with which it maintained churches, schools and charities
wisely and generously. As about a third of the king’s subjects were now
Catholics, both churches were given equal rights and both placed under
the control of the Spiritual Department of the Ministry of the Interior.
The property of the Lutherans was taken over by the state, which in
turn undertook to carry out the tasks hitherto financed by the church.
The schools also were nationalised, while the University of Tubingen
lost its endowments and its autonomy. Unpopular as all these
measures were, the king’s subjects had to admit that he had put the
finances in order and provided the country, at the cost of much suffer-
ing, with an efficient fighting force, to be used for Napoleon’s purposes.
The reforms carried through in these various ways in the south
German states took them a long way towards the realisation of the ideal
of equality before the law, though it was only in Baden that the Code
Napoleon was introduced in its entirety. All Christian confessions
acquired equal rights; all able-bodied men were made liable to military
service, though a loophole was left, as in France, for men of means to
find a substitute; all subjects alike were taxed according to their
capacity, without regard to the old exemptions, and in other respects
too the severely curtailed privileges of the nobility were regulated by
law and left open to revision. Economic reforms included the abolition
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of internal duties — though protective tariffs were retained where the
special needs of these states seemed to require them; weights and
measures were standardised ; serfdom was swept away but the peasantry
were not freed from dues and services, except in the rare instances
when they could purchase immunity, and the landlords retained their
rights of jurisdiction. For lack of reliable officials, many reforms were
not carried through completely, but rapid progress was made on the
whole in the administrative unification of the new states, so that even the
crisis of 1813 did not undo the work of the reformers.
After 1815, most of the differences between north and south Germany
that had arisen since 1806 persisted for some decades. In the southern
states there was no reversal of policy, whereas the northern small states,
whose boundaries had suffered few changes, felt no need for drastic
reforms except, in some cases, of a reactionary kind. In both north and
south the system of government remained authoritarian, for the con-
stitutions granted in the southern states between 1814 and 1820 were
not concessions to a popular demand, but measures designed, on the
lines of the French Charte of 1814, after the restoration of the monarchy,
to increase internal unification and cohesion still further. Though lip
service was paid to the ‘rights of man’, all effective power was retained
in the hands of the government, even genuine budgetary control being
denied to the elected lower chambers. The rulers, while retaining full
sovereignty, undertook to work in co-operation with responsible
ministers, the nature of whose responsibility was left undefined. That
an educated minority, middle-class people of some substance, merchants,
manufacturers and professional men, were not content with this state of
things, is proved by the support they gave to the Liberal movement led
by Karl von Rotteck in Baden, which constantly pressed the radical
claim to government by the people. It was in the struggle for repre-
sentative constitutions that political parties first began to take shape in
Germany.
In the north, the political, social and economic reforms carried out
in Hanover, Brunswick and Electoral Hesse while the French kingdom
of Westphalia lasted were summarily rescinded in 1815, and the
attempt was made to return as far as possible to the old Estates con-
stitution. Saxony, in spite of its adherence to the Confederation of
the Rhine, had under King Frederick I maintained its old forms of
political and social life with as few changes as possible, and it continued
to do so until his death in 1827. Hanover reverted in 1814 to its former
oligarchical system of government, which was little affected in essentials
by the creation in 1819 of a central representative assembly of the
Estates in two chambers. In Brunswick and still more in Hesse the
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sympathies even of the nobility were alienated by the rulers’ autocratic
conduct, and it was naturally in these two states that the July Revolu-
tion of 1830 in Paris led to disturbances, which were followed by the
grant of constitutions more or less resembling those of the southern
states. In Saxony too a popular movement of protest was elicited by
the Paris news, strengthening the hands of the reform group among
the ministers, so that a constitution on south German lines could now
be achieved. Soon afterwards, in 1833, Hanover acquired a modem
constitution. Some of the small states of central Germany, of which
Weimar is the best known, had been granted constitutions by their rulers
immediately after the peace. Their earlier Estates system of representa-
tion had been slightly modernised, but the old authoritarian order of
things little changed.
Prussia meanwhile, in spite of Frederick William’s early promises,
still had no constitution and, like Austria, remained without one until
1848. Its rulers had always detested the French Revolution and every-
thing it stood for, though important ideas had been borrowed from the
French, as we have seen, for the great reforms of the army and adminis-
tration, above all that of compulsory military service for all, which was
made a permanent institution in Prussia in 1814. After the sufferings
and deprivations of the war years, there was naturally everywhere in
Germany a longing for peace and quietness, clearly reflected in the
literature of the so-called Biedermeier period. As the economic life
even of Prussia only slowly took on capitalistic forms, and its people,
like the Germans in general, accepted plain living and close supervision
as something inevitable, it was possible for the government, aiming
ostensibly at the restoration of a better past, to resist successfully the
revolutionary ideas of nationalism, self-determination and freedom of
speech, the spread of which would have threatened the existence of a
multi-national state. Austria was moved even more strongly by similar
considerations, and the Holy Alliance concluded by the Prussian,
Austrian and Russian monarchs in 1815 signed and sealed a common
policy of reaction. The ideas of the romantic intellectuals were every-
where in the air, glorifying the Middle Ages as they saw them, a period
when modem doubts and divisions were unknown and the Christian
order of a truly organic society was guaranteed by Church and State.
There was plenty of radicalism at the German universities among the
young, but at the first open signs of it, Metternich concerted with the
Prussian government the repressive Carlsbad Decrees; and the Germanic
Confederation, dominated by Austria and Prussia, was easily persuaded
to endorse them. The only concession that was made to the ideal of
popular representation was the creation by Prussia in all its separate
provinces of Estates Assemblies on a strictly conservative basis. The
German unity which even the unpolitical Goethe declared in his last
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years (to Eckermann, 23 October 1828) to be bound to come in time,
though he greatly hoped that it would not efface the many local centres
of culture, was urged only by doctrinaire liberals in the south-western
German states, while Prussia and Austria, the only powers capable of
bringing it about, pursued their separate dynastic policies, united only
in their resistance to change.
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CHAPTER XIV
THE AUSTRIAN MONARCHY, 1792-1847 1
I t was the remarkable destiny of the Habsburg monarchy, after
passing, between 1780 and 1792, through the most changeful twelve
years (in internal respects) of all its history, to pass the next fifty-six
in most respects in a condition of suspended animation as near-complete
as the considerable ingenuity of its rulers could contrive. The prime
responsibility for this unquestionably belongs to its monarch, Francis,
whom the Emperor Leopold’s untimely and unexpected death on 1
March 1792 brought, at the unripe age of twenty-four, to a throne which
his physical presence was to occupy for forty-three years and his ghost
for thirteen more. Francis had inherited none of his father’s con-
stitutional beliefs. Like his uncle Joseph, who had had him brought to
Vienna as a boy and educated there for his future duties, he was by
conviction a complete absolutist. He believed that government should be
the expression of the monarch’s will, and that the proper vehicle for
expressing it was a bureaucracy taking and executing the monarch’s
orders. The supreme, if not the sole civic duty of those over whom he
ruled was to be good subjects to him, and the criterion of political
institutions and of social conditions was their aptitude to produce this
effect.
It would not, indeed, be fair to deny to his despotism at least a negative
benevolence. Personally virtuous and unpretentious, and possessed of a
high sense of rectitude, he held that a monarch had, in return, a duty
towards his subjects to observe justice towards them and to enforce it
between them, and that he must not squander their lives on an acquisi-
tive foreign policy, nor their property on his pleasures. But it was the
very opposite of enlightened. Although not at all a stupid man, any
more than he was a bad one — he was shrewd above the average, and
possessed of a disconcerting power to draw from any situation the
conclusions which were correct on his premises — he was mentally near-
sighted and unimaginative, mistrustful and timid of the unknown,
lacking any trace of his uncle’s social vision, imaginative power and
restless impatience with the imperfect. Moreover, in contrast to
Joseph’s combative readiness to take on, even to provoke, opposition,
Francis shrank from controversy or unpleasantness of any kind. These
negative qualities excluded any possibility that he would seek to carry
further Joseph’s policy of reform for reform’s sake, and they also made
1 At the editor’s request, this sketch covers the period up to 1847, since the year 1830 is
no landmark in Austrian history.
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him content to accept the forms, and up to a point the substance, of an
absolutism less complete than Joseph’s, for he was quite capable of
contrasting the real pacification which Leopold had effected by his
retreat with the hornet’s nest which Joseph had brought about the
family ears. Accordingly, however much the autocrat in him may have
disapproved, common sense told him that in the dangerous situation
confronting him on his accession, present safety lay in confirming
Leopold’s compromises and freezing the political and social conditions
established by them. Later, it might perhaps be possible to move a step
back towards a more complete absolutism. The Estates of almost all his
provinces, for their part, asked for little more than to see the ghost of
Joseph II well and truly laid. Only the Hungarians took the occasion to
secure in addition the abolition of the Illyrian Chancellery and a
promise of more scope for the ‘national language’. On this basis,
agreement was quickly reached. Francis was crowned in Buda on 6 June
and in Prague on 8 August, and was then free to devote his attention to
the war with France which had already broken out.
Austria was not, in the event, to know real peace again until 1815;
for up to that date even the intervals in which she was not actively
belligerent were mainly spent, either in patching up wounds received in
the past campaign, or in preparing for the next. In the course of these
years Francis’s philosophy, and the ‘system’ of which it was the ex-
pression, took increasingly clear shape, largely, it would appear, under
the impact of two events, the first of which was the execution, by the
Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris, of his aunt and her consort ; the second,
the discovery, by his own police, in 1794, of two inter-connected
‘Jacobin conspiracies’, one in Vienna, the other in Hungary. The
Viennese ‘conspiracy’ reflected real discontent with the war, which was
widely unpopular, and one or two of the participants held genuinely
treasonable views; but these few cases apart, it was an almost ludicrously
childish affair of a few men who had done little more than sing rather
tipsy catches in praise of liberty. More persons were incriminated in
Hungary, and some of these had certainly indulged in fantastic talk,
but the thing was hardly more serious there, and a suspicious light was
thrown on the whole business by the fact that its self-confessed leader, a
certain Abbe Martinovics, had himself been a police spy for Leopold.
But to Francis the affairs, of which the police made the very most, were
proof that no man was to be trusted. Widespread arrests were made and
exemplary punishments inflicted and, from this date on, the system
became predominantly one of negation and repression. This was not
equivalent to lack of government; the central ministries poured out
during these years an unprecedented volume of enactments, which
included several important pieces of work, notably the codifications in
1803 of the criminal and in 1811 of the civil law. Nor did Francis’s
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Austria ever, even at its worst, know a police terror remotely comparable
to that of Hitlerite Germany or Stalinist Russia.
Not without reason, Francis held secret societies to be the chief hot-
beds of subversive thought, and it was really dangerous to belong to any
such society; the freemasons were particularly suspect. But in general,
the function of the control was prophylactic rather than punitive.
Arrests on political grounds were relatively rare, and sentences were
light by modern standards, with the notable exception of those of 1794
and a few others in which examples were made, especially those made
in Lombardy in 1820-1. Francis himself, who took a lively interest in
the police-reports and even had his private informants and encouraged
denunciants to write to him direct, used the service chiefly as a source of
information. Many a man whose doings and sayings were kept for
years under the closest scrutiny lived out those years quite unmolested.
But the control was very widespread and very minute, particularly over
the professional and ‘intellectual’ classes, in which Francis, drawing
his conclusions from the events of the French Revolution, saw the chief
danger to social stability, and over the civil servants and officers, on
whose loyalty the safety of the State depended. These, from the most
insignificant to the highest — those most of all — lived under its shadow,
and cowered under it. And if not unusually brutal, the ‘system’ was,
even for its day, exceptionally obscurantist. Logical in this as in all
things, Francis traced subversion to its root, which he found in abstract
and speculative thought, and to that root he laid his axe; systematically.
After the Martinovics conspiracy, the then Palatine of Hungary, the
Archduke Alexander, had advised what amounted to cutting out all
education of any sort, except for future bureaucrats. Francis took the
more positive view that education had a function, and he had the
number of schools, both primary and secondary, largely increased;
later, several new technical institutions were founded. But instruction
was directed strictly towards what he regarded as its proper purpose, the
production of ‘high-minded, religious and patriotic citizens’. It was,
accordingly, entrusted chiefly to the Church, whose endowments for the
purpose were considerably increased, the Church itself being at the same
time kept in strict subordination to the State, for as regards relations
between Church and State Francis held unbendingly to the Josephinian
tradition. Another important ‘anti-thought’ weapon was the censor-
ship. The regulations were further tightened up and the service trans-
ferred to the police. It soon became impossible either to print in Austria,
or to import, anything against which the lightest suspicion of un-
orthodoxy or of criticism of the regime might lie. A special ‘re-
censoring Commission’ went through the works which had been
sanctioned in the years of relaxation, between 1780 and 1792, and
banned no less than 2500 of them.
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All this work, whether constructive or repressive, was carried out in
the western half of the monarchy, including Galicia and Venice in the
appropriate years, by the bureaucracy, obeying orders which issued
from the central ministries, and often ultimately from Francis himself.
The Estates of those Lands 1 led a purely shadow existence. In this
sense Francis’s Austria was, after all, a reversion to that of Joseph II,
particularly since the middle and lower ranks of the bureaucracy were
necessarily recruited chiefly from men of middle-class or even humble
origin. Aristocratic writers complained bitterly of the invasion of the
country by this horde of paid scribes. According to middle-class writers,
on the other hand, Austria was still a preserve of the aristocracy. The
great nobles held a near-monopoly of the higher posts in the civil ser-
vice itself, outside the judiciary, as in the army and even the Church,
and their dominant position in the social system was not challenged.
Once the Josephinian land-tax had been finally dropped, the most
important social question which Leopold’s death had left undecided
was whether the abolition of the robot 2 should be made compulsory. A
committee to which the question was referred reported in 1796 in
favour of the retention of the robot, as being ‘a good school of obedience
and humility’. A patent issued that year accordingly confined itself to
sanctioning commutation by agreement with the landlord. This was the
last legislation enacted on the peasant question, outside Hungary, until
1848, except that ‘robotpatents’ were issued for Galicia and the
Bukovina, bringing those Lands into line with the Bohemian and
German-Austrian, and also that landlords in many Lands were required
(at their own expense) to employ qualified lawyers to preside over the
patrimonial courts. The patrimonial system itself, for lower and middle
justice, was left in being, as being cheaper than a paid service.
An influential school of thought was opposed also to the further
development of industry. Man-power was still in short supply,
especially in the war years, and the agrarian interests wanted all avail-
able labour kept on the land; the Church and conservatives in general
warned against the social dangers which might arise with the growth of
an industrial proletariat, especially if allowed to concentrate in the
towns. An opposing school of thought, that of the old mercantilists,
took, indeed, the opposite view in the interest of Austria’s balance of
payments and, as the wars proceeded, sheer necessity compelled
Austria to expand her own manufactures; but even in this field the
freeze was, generally, not relaxed except when this was quite unavoid-
1 The word Land is used here, as in German, because any rendering such as ‘province’
would in some cases be technically incorrect. Those parts of the monarchy which ranked
as ‘kingdoms’ regarded the description ‘province’ as degrading to their status.
2 The forced labour or corvee performed by the villein peasant on the lord’s land was
universally known in the monarchy, even the non-Slavonic parts, by the Slav word robot,
meaning work.
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able, so that for the first fifteen years of Francis’s reign industry
developed only very slowly, and chiefly in the form of small enterprises,
most of them in rural districts. The Continental Blockade then brought
a sudden spurt, which, however, by no means affected all industries;
textiles were the chief gainers.
On the whole, Francis’s ‘system’ tended to become more systematic,
and to reflect his own ideas more accurately, as the years went by, and
as he himself acquired greater experience and more taste for the business
of governing, and as the appropriate institutions and services took shape
under his hand. No resistance to it came from the western half of the
monarchy. The Estates, whose members thoroughly approved of its
conservatism, accepted the unsubstantial role assigned to them with no
more than the most half-hearted of protests. The middle classes were
content to find their places in the rapidly expanding bureaucracy. The
peasants, who had shown considerable unrest so long as they were still
hoping for further reform, had returned to the old ‘humility and sub-
missiveness’. The demonstrations of which Vienna was an occasional
witness were against unpopular wars, high prices, or shortages: not
against political oppression. The only serious criticisms of Francis’s
conduct of affairs came from his own inner circle of advisers, chief
among whom, in these years, were his old tutor. Count Colloredo (who
for some years presided over his Kabinett, or personal secretariat, and
was consulted on every question), his own brothers, Charles, John and
Rainer, and a few obscurer personal confidants, of whom a certain
Baldacci was for years the most influential. None of these ever ques-
tioned Francis’s absolute authority, but they did often criticise the
effectiveness of the machinery through which he exercised it, and his
choice of ministers. Francis, who was very open to suggestions when he
found time to listen to them, tinkered endlessly with the machinery, and
changed ministers often enough, but without ever surrendering his own
personal control, so that the innumerable adjustments had little
practical effect.
There was only one interlude during which he was induced to ask
from his subjects anything more than passive obedience. This was in
1806, after Austria had been forced to sign the Peace of Pressburg
(26 December 1805), a treaty so drastic (for its age) as to send a shock of
resentment and revulsion through the monarchy; the time when, after
having two years previously adopted the title of Emperor of Austria, he
renounced that of Holy Roman Emperor. Foreign policy was now
placed in the hands of Count Philipp Stadion, a Rhinelander, who held
that the war of revanche for which it was his task to prepare could not
succeed unless the people held it to be their own cause. He accordingly
produced a programme of reform designed to awaken German national
feeling (for it was still to the German people, inside and outside Austria,
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that he chiefly looked). Francis did not agree to any of Stadion’s
proposals for social or political reform, but he did sanction a pro-
paganda campaign, which, under the patronage of his then consort,
Maria Ludovica, and the Archdukes Charles and John, stirred the
German Austrians, although not the other peoples of the monarchy, to
considerable national enthusiasm. But this lapse into heresy was short-
lived, and the parent of a return to an intensified orthodoxy. When,
after the Archduke Charles had raised hopes by defeating Napoleon at
Aspem, the campaign of 1809 ended, after all, as disastrously as that
of 1806, and the resulting Treaty of Schonbrunn (Vienna) was even more
severe than that of Pressburg, Francis dismissed Stadion, and the idea
of a partnership with the people fell with its author. The Archduke
Charles and, soon after, John also fell from grace. In their lieu Francis
now listened chiefly to his new foreign minister, Metternich, who already
shared a large proportion of the emperor’s blind spots and prejudices,
and soon made most of the remainder his own.
Up to this point Hungary had been treated, at least in form, differently
from the rest of the monarchy. Antagonistic as he was to all con-
stitutions, Francis had always maintained that the Hungarian was a
bulwark of social and political stability and that it would be unwise to
suspend or openly violate it. For their part, the Hungarian Estates had
in 1792 been so thankful to find their new king ready to re-affirm the
abjuration of Josephinism that they had readily accepted his plea of the
imminent war with France as excuse for postponing immediate con-
sideration of their gravamina (petitions). The Martinovics conspiracy
shook Francis’s faith in Hungarian goodwill, but the arrests made in
connection with it also frightened the Hungarians, besides confirming
their leaders in a conservatism as rigid as that of Francis himself. For
a number of years relations between the two parties continued on a
basis which was not satisfactory to either, but still not so unsatisfactory
as to tempt either to risk a head-on conflict. Francis followed the con-
stitutional procedure of asking the Diet for the recruits and supplies
required by him, and for that purpose, convoked it fairly regularly
(after 1792, in 1796, 1802, 1805, 1807 and 1808). He was thus forced to
content himself with what he could extract from the Hungarians, and
this was always less than he wanted. He did, however, always get
something, and in spite of some scares, notably in 1805, never needed
seriously to reckon with a threat of rebellion.
The Hungarians could flatter themselves with the spectacle of a Diet
convoked almost regularly, and thanks to the tenacity in bargaining dis-
played by that body, Hungary’s contribution to the wars, in terms both
of blood and money, was relatively light. The nobles continued to
enjoy their exemption from taxation, their almost unfettered rule over
their peasants and their control over local affairs, exercised through the
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County Congregationes, and in general, the hand of the regime rested
less heavily on Hungary than on the western Lands. The police was less
omnipresent, the censorship lighter, intellectual freedom in general
greater, so that a very considerable linguistic and cultural revival was
able to develop unimpeded. Moreover, the wars brought big profits to
the Hungarian wheat-producers, who found ready markets for their
produce at high prices.
On the other hand, Francis regularly insisted that (as the constitution
allowed) each Diet should begin by considering his own postulata
(proposals), and as regularly dissolved it as soon as the consideration of
these was finished. The Hungarians’ gravamina, as such, never reached
the stage of debate in the Diet; it was only in the course of the bar-
gaining over the postulata that an occasional grievance was remedied.
The most important of these demands were for extension of the use of
Magyar (in place of Latin) in official life and, as a preliminary to this,
in secondary education (in place of German), and for remedy of the one-
sided economic system which in practice compelled Hungary to cover
her requirements of manufactured goods from Austria, at the manu-
facturer’s price plus a heavy import duty, and to offer all her agricul-
tural produce to Austria at the latter’s price. Francis was quite unforth-
coming on both points; under great pressure, he made a few small
concessions on the language question in 1805 and 1808, but refused to
yield an inch on the economic issue.
That again and again matters were somehow patched up was due
almost entirely to the efforts of the Archduke Joseph, who had suc-
ceeded Alexander as palatine in 1796 after the latter had been killed in
an accident, and mediated between king and nation with quite ex-
ceptional tact. Even so, tempers on both sides grew steadily more
ragged. In 1807 the Hungarians gave such forcible expression to their
objections to contributing to a war, the unconcealed object of which
was to strengthen Austria’s position in Germany, as to earn for the Diet
the historic soubriquet of ‘the Accursed’. If its successor of 1808 was,
by contrast, nicknamed ‘the Handsome’, this was mainly thanks to the
unexampled pressure and corruption which had been applied before it
met.
After the Treaty of Schonbrunn, a crisis seemed inevitable unless the
affairs of the monarchy as a whole took a turn for the better. They
began, instead, by taking a further turn for the worse. Invasion, defeat
and cruel territorial mutilation, each grievous in itself, had also com-
bined to bring to a head the one internal process on which Francis had
been unable to impose a standstill. For many years the government had
been spending beyond its revenue, covering the gap partly by loans,
partly by the issue of paper Bankozettel (treasury notes). It had paid
its own servants (and also collected taxes) in this paper as though it were
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equivalent to its nominal value in silver, but in fact, as the note circula-
tion increased, the Bankozettel were quoted in Augsburg at a rising
discount, rising so steeply in 1810 that by 1811 the gulden was quoted
at one tenth of its nominal value. Inland prices had risen on approxi-
mately the same scale. After various expedients had been tried, and all
had failed, the finance minister, Count Wallis, issued a patent on
20 February 1811. All Bankozettel, of which 1060 million (gulden)
were then in circulation, were called in, holders being given in return for
every five Bankozettel one new Erlosungsschein (redemption note) of
the same nominal value. The new currency was declared to be as the
old had been, equal in value to its full equivalent in silver, and required
so to be taken. All government payments were to be made, and all
receipts collected, in it; the interest on government bonds was, however,
cut by half. The government pledged itself not to increase the note
circulation beyond its new figure of 212 million, which was that at
which the Bankozettel had last been quoted at par. Repayment of
private debts contracted during the inflationary period was to be made
on a scale based on the quotation of the Bankozettel in Augsburg in the
month when the debt was contracted.
Necessary as it was to stop the inflation, this drastic measure inflicted
cruel hardship on many individuals, and also caused widespread dis-
location. For decades thereafter the memory of the ‘State bankruptcy’
remained with the inhabitants of the monarchy as one of the most
disastrous experiences of their own or their fathers’ lives; it was indeed
that memory, more than any other single factor, that touched off - the
revolution of 1848 in both Vienna and Hungary. Furthermore, it did
not even achieve its object, except momentarily. For a couple of years
prices remained stable at the 18 1 1 level, as expressed in the new currency,
but in 1812 the Government was forced to break its promise and to issue
new paper money, and the inflation recommenced, making the condi-
tion of the fixed-income classes as miserable as it had been before the
issue of the patent.
Moreover, the patent precipitated the threatening crisis with Hungary.
The Diet which met in 18 11 flatly denied the legality of the patent, as
applied to Hungary. It admitted the issue of the currency to be one of
the monarch’s rights, but argued that the printing of uncovered paper
money was an abuse of that right, and merely an indirect way of raising
taxation through unauthorised channels. It therefore refused to take
over the share of the new currency which had been allotted to Hungary,
or to contribute towards the amortisation fund. On 18 May 1812,
Francis dissolved it abruptly (not in the event to reconvoke it until
thirteen years had passed) and promulgated the patent by royal decree.
In 1815, however, peace at last returned to Austria, this time to stay
and wearing a face different from that which its earlier visits had
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shown. At last, Austria had been on the winning side. It had recovered
all its old territories lost since 1792, except the Netherlands and the out-
lying possessions in West Germany, and practically all its acquisitions
made at any time since that date, except Cracow (now a Free City).
It had also acquired Venetia. Its position in Germany could be
regarded as more really influential than before the liquidation of the
Holy Roman Empire, and it dominated Italy through its own possessions
and its influence over the other Italian courts. It was booked to
receive a war indemnity, instead of paying one.
The decade which followed was, nevertheless, still a very hard one.
It opened with inflation still rampant. On 1 July 1816, the State again
in effect repudiated a big fraction (this time 60 per cent) of its debt, and
it was several years more before it proved possible, with the help of a
newly-founded national bank, to stabilise the rate of the paper money
and eventually to return to a metal currency. Order was thus superficially
restored to the state finances, but the order was never more than
superficial. Economies were made, especially on the army, and the
annual deficit was reduced, but it was never wiped out. Year after year
the State had to resort to the money-lenders, and the service of its loans,
for which it usually had to pay dearly, became a very large item in its
annual budget. Nobody seemed to mind this so long as the State papers
were quoted at par, and successive ministers of finance managed to
achieve this, with the help of their banker friends; but it was plain
that a bill was mounting up which one day would cost someone
dear.
Then 1815 and 1816 were black years for the poor, with harvests
failing, prices soaring and actual starvation widespread. Thereafter,
the deflation, the cessation of the stimulus of war and the reappearance
on the market of English manufactured goods on the one hand and
Russian and Roumanian wheat on the other, brought with them an
acute economic crisis under which both the industries which had sprung
up during the Continental Blockade and the Hungarian and Galician
wheat-growers suffered very severely. There was extensive unemploy-
ment, accentuated by the demobilisation of the field armies. It was not
until the late ’twenties that production began to rise again and economic
conditions in general began to approach those usually associated with
the word ‘peace’.
Meanwhile, the fact that he had after all weathered so many years
without net loss of territory and without serious internal trouble (all
the successes having come after he had stopped taking his brothers’
advice) was to Francis convincing proof of the rightness of his own
principles of government, and he continued to apply them, if anything,
more strictly than before. In this he was abetted and encouraged by
Metternich, who, if not the author of the ‘system’, was certainly an
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approving accessory to it. The only important change in tone was that
under the influences of Metternich and of Francis’s pious fourth wife,
Carolina Augusta, the alliance with the Catholic Church became more
intimate. The control of the press, the universities and intellectual life in
general was even intensified under the hands of Metternich and the new
chief of police, Sedlnitzky, a man even less liberal than any of his
predecessors. The re-acquired or newly-acquired provinces were re-
organised, or organised, on the now established principle of centralised
rule from above; Lombardy and Venetia were, it is true, styled a
kingdom and given a viceroy (the Archduke Rainer) and certain separate
institutions, with Italian as the the language of administration, justice
and education, but they enjoyed no more real self-government than the
rest of Francis’s dominions. Only Hungary provided a partial exception.
When, in 1820 and 1821, the Hungarian counties made difficulties about
delivering the men and supplies which Metternich wanted for sup-
pressing the threat of revolution in Italy, the government put in
‘administrators’, who collected what it wanted by main force; but this
operation proved so difficult and expensive that in 1825 Francis found
it expedient, after all, to reconvoke the Diet and to give it a sort of
apology for having violated its rights and a promise to respect them in
future. Even this, however, amounted to little more than an assurance
that he would use legal forms for getting his own way.
And, as in the war years, so in the fifteen years which followed them,
the country in general seemed no whit ahead of its rulers. In 1820 and
1821 there were stirrings in Lombardy-Venetia, themselves not so much
reactions against Austrian rule as reflexes of movements elsewhere in
Italy. After a relatively small number of arrests had been made, the
‘Kingdom’ settled down into submission. Tranquillity was complete in
the Austrian and Bohemian Lands, and hardly less so in Galicia; the
modest, but in its way attractive, ‘Biedermeier’ culture of the period
is essentially one of acceptance.
Only Hungary kicked against the pricks, and the Hungarian Diet
itself, as late as 1825, was looking back rather than forward: defending
a medieval constitution, not looking for a new life. This was broadly
true even of its successor, which Francis convoked in 1830, this time in
view of the revolutionary situations in Western Europe, Russian
Poland and Italy, which again seemed to Metternich to call for defensive
preparations. Most of the Diet’s members were as anxious as Metternich
himself to keep revolutionary infection from spreading, and they voted
the required supplies readily enough. At the same time, Francis had
asked the Diet to crown his elder son, Ferdinand, in his own life-time.
A coronation in Hungary traditionally involved a recapitulation of the
nation’s rights, which the monarch, having agreed the list, then swore
to respect. They therefore insisted that Francis should at last give a
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proper hearing to their long-disregarded gravamina ; and Francis
promised to do this at a Diet to meet the next year.
The Diet in fact assembled only in 1832, after a postponement excused
by the cholera which ravaged Galicia and Hungary in 1831, but really
occasioned by fear of a political infection; and by that time the successes
of liberalism in Western Europe had produced a wide-spread reaction
throughout the monarchy. The idea of reform was suddenly everywhere
in the air. As things stood, it could not without danger be voiced out-
side Hungary, but there the political atmosphere had been almost
magically transformed by the dynamic genius of Count Istvan
Szechenyi, a young aristocrat who, on his travels in Western Europe,
had been deeply shocked by the contrast between conditions there and
in his own country. On his return, he had initiated a variety of practical
enterprises, including the foundation of a steamship service on the
Danube, and was electrifying public opinion by his writings: according
to his revolutionary doctrine, the venerated Hungarian Constitution,
with its sacrosanct array of noble privileges which exempted the noble
from taxation, proclaimed his land inalienable and left him almost
absolute master of his peasants, was much less a fortress defending her
against foreign oppression than a prison confining her in poverty and
backwardness.
Szechenyi made little practical headway at the Diet with his proposals ;
nor, indeed, did he ever succeed in giving the Hungarian reform move-
ment the direction wished by himself, which was one of orderly move-
ment, paternally directed from above. But he set its floods in motion,
and before the Diet (which sat for four years) had ended, the system
had been dealt a mortal blow by the death of Francis, on 2 March 1835.
Ferdinand was a kindly simpleton, clearly incapable of ruling except in
name. Francis had left a political testament, enjoining his son ‘not to
displace any of the foundations of the structure of the State, to rule and
not to alter’ and to place himself under the governance of his youngest
uncle, the Archduke Ludwig, and of Mettemich. Metternich’s numer-
ous enemies, however, secured the addition to this Council of Regency
(as it was in practice, although the name was Staats-imd-Konferenzrat)
of Ferdinand’s brother, Franz Karl, and of Count Franz Kolowrat, a
Bohemian aristocrat who for some years past had been de facto in
charge of the internal administration and finances of the monarchy.
The Archduke was there chiefly to represent the future, in the person of
his son, Francis Joseph, the heir presumptive to the throne (since
Ferdinand was unlikely to become a father). But Kolowrat was
Mettemich’s embittered rival, and, although his own liberalism was very
half-hearted, he was for that reason the hope of all liberals in Vienna,
as well as of all those who, for any other reason, disliked Metternich.
In fact, the new regime was little more progressive than the old,
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especially as Ludwig, himself in any case a man of narrow views and
limited abilities, tried, out of piety, to fulfil Francis’s deathbed in-
junctions. But it was incomparably less effective, its own immobility
resulting chiefly from the reciprocal neutralisation of the equal and
opposite forces of Mettemich and Kolowrat. It could only be a question
of time before its foundations were sucked away by the waves of pent-
up discontents, national, political and social, which were now surging
all around it.
For in spite of everything, the monarchy of the Vormarz (as the years
preceding the revolution of March 1 848, are commonly known) was a
very different place from the monarchy of the 1790’s. The population
had increased, with variations between and within the Lands, by some-
thing like 40 per cent. Most of the country was still agricultural, but
the larger towns, headed by Vienna, were growing apace. Industrialisa-
tion, after its long setback, was making progress again, and changing its
character. The use of machinery was spreading, and many industries,
headed by the textile industries of Bohemia and Lower Austria, were
going over from handwork to factory production. The second stage of
this process was just setting in with the construction of the railways,
which, besides themselves calling into being much new industry in
connection with their construction and equipment, made possible, for
the first time, the large-scale development of heavy industry and
mining. To the class structure of the monarchy was now added, on the
one hand, a powerful independent entrepreneur class, representing the
new financial and industrial interests, and on the other, a not incon-
siderable, although localised, industrial proletariat. The countryside
itself was altering, socially and economically. Landlords, especially on
the largest estates in the more advanced Lands (the great Bohemian and
Moravian landlords leading the way), were going in seriously for
production for profit, and this and other factors, which did not, indeed,
all operate in the same direction, were altering the position of the
peasants, in relation both to their landlords and to the State.
All these developments were producing a number of social problems,
which affected all the Lands of the monarchy, although not in equal
degree. By 1847 the villein peasants were almost everywhere in a fair
way to winning their battle. The value to their landlords of robot
unwillingly performed and of dues ingeniously sabotaged had become so
patently inferior to that of free hired labour that the more progressive
landlords were themselves petitioning for the ‘liberation’ of this class;
the main big outstanding question was that of compensation for the
landlords, and the chief opponent of the reform — outside those land-
lords who, either from the remote geographical situation of their
estates or for lack of capital, still clung to a pre-capitalist economy —
was the government, which declared that it could not itself finance the re-
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form, and even objected to proposals for carrying it through by private
enterprise, as calculated to compete with the government on the credit
market. Far more grievous in reality than that of the peasant farmers
was the position of that agrarian class, in most provinces now out-
numbering the peasant-holders, which the rapid growth of the popula-
tion had left with holdings below subsistence level, or altogether
landless. Among these there was in the ’forties constant and increasing
distress, which catastrophic harvests in 1846 and 1847 made almost
unbearable; in each of these years thousands of people died of sheer
starvation. Prices of foodstuffs soared again, to twice, thrice, even five
times the 1 844 level. In addition, the feverishly developed textile industry
ran suddenly into an acute crisis of over-production. Even the pitiful
wage, itself barely enough to keep them from starvation, which the
exploited factory hands had received, was now lost to many of them,
leaving them dependent on crudely organised public works, or on
charity. There were riots and machine-wreckings, and the suburbs of
Vienna, Prague and other industrial centres swarmed with starving
and desperate beggars.
The tribulations of the poor did not, however, threaten the integrity
of the monarchy or the stability of its regime. The national aspirations
of its peoples did, except in so far as their complexity and frequent
mutual antagonisms offered the possibility of using one as an ally
against another. In the first years of the Vormarz, the strongest of
these national movements was still the Hungarian, which developed
with extraordinary rapidity. Szechenyi, the pioneer of 1830, was, by
1836, already being shouldered aside by the younger generation. The
mouthpiece of this was the fiery and radical Louis Kossuth, an intemper-
ate but inspiring and convincing advocate of every kind of liberal and
democratic reform; unlike Szechenyi (who wished to work with Vienna),
he told the nation that the first necessity was to reduce the links with
Vienna to those established under the Pragmatic Sanction, both as a
postulate of the nation’s right to independence and as the indispensable
preliminary to any further reform, political, social, economic or
cultural.
The Staatskonferenz began by trying repression: in 1837 Kossuth
and some others were arrested and imprisoned, and the country was
ruled semi-dictatorially. But the flare-up of the eastern question in
1840 compelled a return to a policy of appeasement. Kossuth was
released, and became the idol of the nation, which largely adopted his
liberal and anti-Austrian tenets. In this situation, a group of magnates,
led by Count George Apponyi and calling themselves ‘progressive
conservatives’, came together and evolved a programme which in-
cluded many of the popular desiderata in the social and economic fields;
but the reforms were to be enacted from above, under elaborate safe-
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guards and combined with strict political control and safeguards for
the link with Austria. In 1843 this group persuaded Mettemich to
place them in charge of Hungary. The Opposition drew together in
reply, and in 1847 the most level-headed among them, Francis Deak,
produced for them a programme of democratic and national reform
which included a responsible ministry for internal affairs, a Parliament
based on an extended franchise, complete liberation of the peasants,
extension of taxation to the nobles, and union with Transylvania.
The ‘Government Party’ itself accepted many of the internal reforms,
so that when the Diet met in November 1847, it was largely agreed on
these points, although differing widely on the cardinal question of the
link with central authority.
The Hungarian movement was, however, the work of a class which
was itself almost entirely Magyar, in feeling if not in origin, and saw its
Hungary in terms which, at least on the upper levels, should be a
Magyar national state; and its development was now meeting with
increasing opposition from the non-Magyars who formed a good half of
the population. The first conflict between Magyars and non-Magyars
revolved largely round the demand of the former for the extension of
the use of the Magyar language in public life. In the long struggle,
which had begun as early as the Leopoldian Diet, the Hungarians had
at first asked for no more than the right to use what was the mother-
tongue of the vast majority of those affected in communicating with the
central government of their own country, and for facilities for in-
struction in the same language, above the elementary level. But even
the former demand had brought opposition from the Croats, who
would be placed at a disadvantage if the neutral Latin were replaced
by Magyar; the Hungarians replied that it was unreasonable to ask
them to sacrifice their convenience and national pride for the sake of the
handful of Croat nobles concerned.
But soon the conflict widened, and deepened. A chauvinistic younger
Magyar generation rode roughshod over the Croats’ objections and also
forced through legislation which left unreasonably little scope, in any
field, for the non-Magyar languages of Inner Hungary; extremists
wanted to turn the whole population by force into Magyars. The non-
Magyar peoples, meanwhile, were experiencing their own national
awakenings, and some of them were developing national ambitions
which were quite incompatible with even the more restrained forms of
the Hungaro-Magyar ideal. The lead was taken by the Croats, among
whom French rule in Napoleon’s ‘Kingdom of Illyria’ had powerfully
stimulated national feeling. In the early ’thirties backwoods clinging of
the Croat nobles to ancient forms gave way to a heady nationalism,
almost pathologically anti-Magyar and dreaming of a Great Croatia,
to include Dalmatia and the disputed counties of Slavonia, and to be
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detached from Hungary and to own allegiance only to the emperor.
The ruling spirit of this new movement, the spacious-thinking Ljudevit
Gaj, cherished a still wider vision, of an ‘Illyria’, embracing all the
southern Slav peoples; with this end in view, he sought contact with the
Serbs of Hungary and of the Principality. All this was viewed with
pleasure in Vienna, especially by Kolowrat, who saw in the Croats a
weapon which could be used against the rebellious Magyars. After a
while, the government awoke, indeed, to the dangerous implications of
the Illyrian doctrine, and clamped down on it, but continued to en-
courage Croat nationalism, which needed, indeed, no stimulus.
The Hungarian Serbs had also turned their backs on Hungary; the
hearts of many of them were in Belgrade, but for the time they looked
to Vienna, under whose direct orders those of them inhabiting the
Military Frontier already stood, along with that half of the Croat
population which was similarly placed. They developed little enthusiasm
for ‘Illyrianism’, which they regarded as a papistical snare, but were
willing enough to ally themselves with the Croats against Budapest.
Some of the Slovaks looked similarly towards Prague, or even Russia,
with visions of a Czecho-Slovak polity or a great Pan-Slav State,
while others said that they were willing to be good Hungarians,
but not Magyars. Others, indeed, with most of the Germans of Inner
Hungary and the majority of its Jews, supported the Hungarians, and
far from resisting Magyarisation, regarded it as a benefit and an
opportunity.
The Hungarian drama was re-enacted in Transylvania, with a time-
lag. After a start retarded by particularist and conservative feeling, the
nobles of the Grand Principality became enthusiastic partisans of the
union with Hungary. Pending this, they tried to enact legislation, on the
Hungarian model, which offended the national feeling and the historic
rights of the ‘Saxons’ and drove them, too, closer to Vienna. At the
same time, the under-privileged Roumanians, who now constituted a
full half of the population, agitated for social emancipation and
national liberties. The ultimate ideal of many of these was unification
with their brothers across the Carpathians in an independent national
State; but, so long as the Danubian Principalities were under Turkish
rule, they too, perforce, placed their hopes in Vienna.
In the West, the Italian provinces had become lost spiritually to the
monarchy ever since the aspiration towards national unity had fairly
taken hold of the Italian people as a whole. In Lombardy and Venetia
themselves the national movement was more demonstrative than
formidable (Venice passed for the least revolutionary of all the larger
cities of Italy), but it was notorious that Charles Albert of Piedmont was
only waiting his chance to prise the two provinces out of Austria’s hold,
and this prospect, combined with the obligation to protect Austria’s
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other clients in Italy, made it necessary to keep a large force south of
the Alps, thus denuding other danger-spots of troops.
The chief of these danger-spots, after Hungary, was for some time
Galicia, but in that province the peak of the danger passed before the
Vormarz had ended. In February 1846 the Polish National Committee
in Paris, singularly miscalculating the situation, tried to launch a
revolution from bases in Cracow and Galicia, where it was hoped that
the peasants would join in, in return for a promise of freedom and land.
The peasants, instead, used the arms issued to them to carry through a
jacquerie against their landlords. The chief positive result of this ill-
fated enterprise was that the Powers allowed Austria to annex Cracow.
This fiasco left the Austrian Poles sullen and resentful, but, except for a
few hotheads, convinced of the impossibility of renewing the struggle
in the face of the common front formed against them by the partition-
ing Powers, and the hostility of their peasants. The imperial authorities
found yet another ally in the nascent national feeling of the Ruthenes
of East Galicia, a backward, impoverished and almost inarticulate
people who positively welcomed the tutelage of the Austrian bureaucrats
in return for the protection which it gave them against the exactions of
their Polish landlords.
In the heart of the monarchy, the struggle for the restoration of pro-
vincial self-government, against centralised bureaucratic despotism, was
led by the Estates of Bohemia, who in the ’forties began to assert them-
selves with considerable vigour. This, like the Hungarian and Croat
movements in their early stages, was essentially a home rule movement,
and in many respects the reverse of progressive, for the document to
which its supporters appealed, the Verneuerte Landesordnung (Revised
Land Ordinance) of 1627, was, no less than the Hungarian constitution,
essentially a charter of class privileges ; and, although the Estates con-
tained a reform party, it was, as late as 1848, in a small minority. But
Bohemia and Moravia were also the scenes of a vigorous Czech national
revival, which was not merely linguistic and cultural, but also, from the
first, strongly political. As its imm ediate objective, this movement was
fighting only for equal rights for the Czech language with the German
in education, justice and administration, but behind this lay the vision
of a Czech national state (within the monarchy) comprising not only the
Lands of the Bohemian Crown, but also the Slovak areas of North
Hungary. Many of the young Czech nationalists were also strongly
radical in their social and political ideas. In spite of this, the Czech
aristocrats patronized and fostered the Czech national movement as an
ally against the mainly German bureaucracy.
The Germans of the monarchy were the most divided politically of all
its component nationalities. Outside the university students, few of
them were affected by the romantic nationalism which was intoxicating
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the Magyars, the Croats and the Czechs. Neither, outside the Tyrol, was
there any very strong provincial particularism. The whole Austrian
system, although as much a negation of German nationalism as of
Czech or Magyar, yet rested mainly on the shoulders of a bureaucracy
and Corps of Officers mostly composed of Germans by origin or
adoption. And conversely, a substantial part of the German middle
classes derived their livelihoods from serving the monarch. Thus, the
vast majority of these classes were loyal to the monarchy, and the greater
number were also supporters of the centralising character of its system;
this if only because a centralised state was the best safeguard for the
Germans whose positions were being threatened by the rising Czech
nationalism in Bohemia and Moravia and (in a lesser degree) by a
parallel, although still much weaker, Slovene nationalism in Styria and
Carinthia.
On the other hand, by far the largest part of the entrepreneur and pro-
fessional class of the monarchy (outside Lombardo-Venetia) was, again,
German or German-speaking Jewish (the Jews at that time usually
identified themselves with the Germans). It was German and German-
Jewish business men and financiers who chiefly fretted against the dead
hand of the bureaucracy, German and German-Jewish intellectuals
who found the censorship burdensome. Consequently Vienna, in
particular, became the centre of a vigorous reform movement which was
highly critical of the regime from its own point of view, and thanks to the
social and financial status of its members, of an importance quite dis-
proportionate to its size in numbers. Its weakness lay in the impossi-
bility (soon to become apparent) of reconciling the mutually conflicting
claims of liberalism and nationality.
Thus by the turn of 1847-8 almost every social class and almost every
nationality in the monarchy was chafing under the system and demand-
ing change. A touch (such as in the event was provided by the revolu-
tion in Paris) would be enough to bring the old structure down, but what
would succeed it, no man could then tell.
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CHAPTER XV
ITALY, 1793-1830
T he dates 1793 and 1830 are not very helpful limits. Much that
was of great importance happened in Italy between them, yet they
are themselves hardly significant. 1793 began with the murder of
the French agent in Rome (13 January) but this is not enough to mark
an epoch. Although Italy was by then already involved in the diplomatic
and military struggles of Europe, the course of her history was
decisively changed only in 1796. In that year, it may be said, the
Settecento ended and the Revolution came to the peninsula ; the modern
history of Italy begins with the physical presence of the French army.
The next great change came at the collapse of the Napoleonic system —
the restorations of 1799-1800 were only an interlude — and this chapter
can be roughly divided at 1814. Before that collapse the whole peninsula
had gradually been subjected to common governmental and political
influences for the first time in centuries; after 1814, although all the
restored regimes had to take account of Austrian predominance, the
peninsula was again fragmented. 1830 did not change this state of
affairs.
The starting-point of this assessment must be the structure of Italy
in 1793. In no sense was it then a unity and its components were to
absorb the shock of the revolution in very different ways. Its funda-
mental divisions were topographical: within regions divided by
mountains and climate there existed widely differing societies, separated
from one another even by language. Political boundaries stabilised their
provincialism. Italy consisted of a jumble of states of which the
kingdoms of Sardinia and Naples 1 , the grand-duchy of Tuscany, the
lesser duchies of Massa and Carrara, Parma and Modena and the
principality of Piombino were monarchical. There were the three
republics of Venice, Genoa and Lucca and a tiny fourth in San Marino.
In the Po valley, Austrian Lombardy embraced the old duchies of Milan
and Mantua. Finally, across the middle of the peninsula sprawled the
Papal States. 2 The governments of this hotch-potch had developed in
very different ways in spite of superficial similarities. Several of them
had been affected by ‘enlightened despotism’, yet, in spite of attempts
at rationalisation, their structure was often scarcely more coherent
than that of the peninsula as a whole. Localism, privilege and legal
1 The kingdom of Sardinia consisted of Savoy, Piedmont, the county of Nice and the
island of Sardinia. That of Naples included Sicily.
* For a fuller description of the structure of Italy before 1793, see vol. vrn, ch. xrn. b.
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diversification survived the reforming rulers and their civil servants.
It is impossible to select a ‘typical’ Italian state of 1793; they were as
varied as the landscape itself.
Only in one very general way did Italy show a certain homogeneity.
Conditions of life differed greatly and the organisation of property
took many forms, but the economies of all the states and regions except
the great seaports were dominated by agriculture. Consequently, the
social structure of all of them was shaped by the overwhelming
numerical preponderance of the peasants, varied as the precise meanings
of that term might be. The population had risen during the century and
it is likely that the peasants’ standard of living had fallen; most of them
were poor and many were destitute. Urban life was too deeply embedded
in this rural setting and too anaemic to develop another class which
could compete with the landowners for social power. Only the clergy
could match the power of the nobility and as landowners the two groups
often had identical interests. The social pre-conditions of the capitalist
mentality were lacking; there was little large-scale industry and much to
prevent its appearance in privileges, out-dated mercantilist ideas, and
localism. Eighteenth-century Italy was a bundle of societies in which
small privileged classes enjoying wealth and power resisted the en-
croachments which monarchs and bureaucrats made in the interests of
general well-being. The peasants looked on and did not understand
where their interest lay in the struggle. Yet this pattern was blurred and
confused at a hundred points by local and temporary differences.
The first impact of the French Revolution on these societies came
before the invasion. The peninsula was so open to foreign social and
cultural influences that some response, even if only from the in-
tellectuals, was inevitable. Some were enthusiastic, like the Milanese
Gorani, who became a French citizen and joined the Jacobin club;
others, even when excited by the possibility of general enlightenment,
were more hesitant. The Lombard economist Pietro Verri thought the
Italians were too immature to be worthy of the reign of virtue. Very
few Italians at first saw as far as this. The revolution in France was to
them simply one more change in those diplomatic variables of which
Italian history had for so long been a function. (For the Papacy’s
special response, see Chapter VI.) Then the rulers and the nobles
began to change their views under the impression of the tales of
the emigres and the crumbling of the monarchy. Because of this the
first important effect of the revolution in Italy was the abandonment
by the princes of their patronage of the reforming civil servants; now the
privileged classes could counter-attack. Some intellectuals became
alarmed too; Gorani abandoned the revolution in the Terror. After
1793, such changes were hurried on by the war. Its outbreak finally
divided the states into two groups, the allies and the neutrals.
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Among the former, the position of Sardinia was the most under-
standable. Her alliances with Austria and Great Britain followed
logically from the French aggression which absorbed Savoy and Nice;
the influence of the emigres at Turin was hardly needed to bring her
into the coalition. In any case, war seemed to offer her king the chance
of resuming the traditional policy of aggrandisement by exploiting the
rivalry of great powers. Naples became a belligerent not only because
of her Austrian queen, but also because of her special interests as a
maritime power — a source at once of weakness and of strength in her
dealings with France and Great Britain. Lombardy, as an Austrian
possession, was involved willy-nilly in the war and, to a lesser degree,
so were the neutrals, Tuscany, Genoa, Venice and Modena. Genoa had
declared herself neutral in 1792, deeply distrustful of Sardinia and
well aware of the importance of her commercial ties with France.
Venice found her position more cramped but also remained neutral.
Hercules III of Modena did the same. Tuscany was forced to dismiss the
French minister after some British diplomatic and naval bullying but
in 1795 she resumed complete neutrality and made a treaty with France.
Below the governmental level, the attitudes of Italians were slowly
crystallising under the strains of war. Some of them were frightened by
the tales of the emigres, but others began to look to the new republic
more hopefully. The most interesting political development of these
years was the sympathy for France and the principles of the revolution
which gradually drew together widely separated strands of opinion
whose only common feature was frustration under the existing regimes.
Reformers who could no longer obtain a hearing, anti-curialists and
Jansenists in the church, freemasons and illuminati who resented
cultural backwardness and bigotry, could all find a common focus for
their hopes in republicanism and the rights of man. In 1793 an address
from some Italian refugees to the Convention already announced
confidently ‘les italiens vous attendent’. It was untrue — and, indeed,
was always to remain untrue for the majority of Italians — but it was the
first gesture of a renewed Italian political life.
The origins and nature of this new political dissent have been much
studied. It was stimulated by the panic shown in some of the states as
the revolution went on. The Austrians were less alarmed than some
rulers, but even they began to look suspiciously at the reformers whom
Joseph II had encouraged. Men like Pietro Verri, once employed by
the government, now found themselves distrusted. Yet Lombardy
produced few ‘Jacobins’ 1 before 1796, in spite of the assertions of
refugees at the time and historians since, and it was in other states that
1 This confusing term, loosely used by contemporary propagandists and subsequent
historians, does not imply common positive policies nor, often, anything more than
hostility to the old regime.
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governments first turned frustration into sedition. In Naples, repression
was swift and violent. In 1794 there were executions and exiles; things
became worse when a rising took place in Sicily in the following year.
In 1794 there were executions in Turin, too. Such a potential was bound
to be exploited by the French agents in the peninsula. Tilly, at Genoa,
and his successor Cacault (who also served at Venice and Florence)
conducted propaganda and espionage and helped the discontented to
take refuge in the neutral states or France. They could point to the
Convention’s decree of 19 November 1792, which promised ‘fraternity
and succour to all the peoples who want to recover their liberty’.
Persecution was their best ally; the common experience of exile was
decisive in bringing about the cross-fertilisation of political dissent in
Italy. Refugees came to France from all the states, but above all from
Sardinia and Naples. There is little evidence that they had ever enjoyed
wide and popular support in Italy, yet this was not important for the
subsequent shaping of the legend about them. Exile began the fusion
of the republican and democratic ideas of the Revolution with a con-
sciousness of Italian nationality. The refugees found common enemies
in the governments which had driven them out; to some of them alliance
with the French and a united Italian state quickly seemed the logical
consequence. Pre-eminent among those who encouraged such views
was Buonarroti, commissaire of the French Republic in Oneglia (which
was occupied in 1 794). He became the main channel by which the Italian
refugees urged on the French government the wisdom of supporting
revolution in Italy. Nevertheless, more than exile was required to
create Italian nationalism; the next step in the process was to be
supplied only by occupation and revolution.
The invasion of 1796 ended the Guerre des Alpes and the revolution
entered Italy. Bonaparte did more than alter the diplomatic situation
there : he destroyed the coalition and transformed the European scene.
The battles of April forced Sardinia to accept an armistice, and a
campaign which followed in the Po valley resulted quickly in the fall
of Milan (15 May), the submission of Modena (17 May) and the Austrian
evacuation of Lombardy. A besieged garrison stayed in Mantua.
The Neapolitans hastily came to terms (and made a definitive peace in
October) and the Pope obtained an armistice. An autumn campaign
thwarted the Austrian attempts to relieve Mantua and recover
Lombardy, and by the end of the year the coalition was in ruins. Genoa
had agreed to close her ports to the British. The treaty of San Ildefonso
(19 August) between France and Spain destroyed any hope of effective
British action in the Italian theatre by forcing the withdrawal of the
British fleet and the abandonment of Corsica. At the beginning of
1797, only Mantua stood between Bonaparte and the resumption of
the offensive; when it fell, the coalition entered its final agony.
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Bonaparte pressed into Carinthia and on 18 April the Preliminaries of
Leoben were signed. 1
For the first time in half a century Austria was not the dominating
power in Italy. France was now her companion and rival and the way
in which her preponderance would be used was not known. Because
of the secret Preliminaries, the French Directory could not take
the obvious course of realising its new assets by exchanging Italian
territory for a frontier on the Rhine. Bonaparte’s prestige and power
made it impossible to do this, whatever the wishes of the Directors.
Moreover, other policies had their advocates at Paris. The instructions
given to Bonaparte in 1796 had been more than fulfilled. The coalition
had been broken up, Genoa’s subservience confirmed and the British
strategical position in the Mediterranean compromised. In addition,
huge territories had been conquered. Here lay the difficulty; the alterna-
tive to using them for bargaining was to organise them — but how?
There were good ideological and political arguments for the creation of
satellite republics, but some of the Italian refugees who followed the
French army back to Italy were asking for more. They wanted a united
Italy. They should have known already that the French would not
stomach this: in 1795 the Directory had hopefully negotiated with the
Sardinian ‘tyrant’ and was prepared to leave him on his throne; it
had treated the conquered area around Oneglia as French territory;
Bonaparte himself had announced his intention of governing his con-
quests directly in the immediate future. Moreover, and this the Italians
did not know, even in May 1796 reports began to come to the Directory
from its diplomatic agents in Italy which strengthened its unwillingness
to embrace an ideologically correct or even a republican solution of the
Italian problem. As the Directory told its foreign minister, the Italians,
rotted by despotism, were not yet ready for liberty.
The Italian refugees’ prospects of influencing French policy had been,
indeed, worse than ever when the invasion began. Their association
with Buonarroti had compromised them; after his arrest for complicity
in the Babeuf plot he was a useless and embarrassing ally. The Directory
now regarded his Italian friends as guilty by association and henceforth
proceeded on the largely mistaken assumption that the Italian patriots
were Babouvist social revolutionaries. It was an assumption which was
to have immense and disastrous consequences for the Italians; its
immediate import could be seen when the French contemptuously
abandoned the little republic of Alba set up by refugees in Piedmont
after the invasion and ordered the Italian revolutionaries to stop
bothering the Sardinian government. Nor could the unitarists find
much support for their ideas in Italy; when an essay competition was
1 A note at the end of this chapter summarises the complicated territorial changes which
took place from this time onwards.
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held in Milan in September 1796 on the theme of the best way of
organising Italy, only one-third of the Italian entrants advocated
unification.
It was the views of Bonaparte which mattered most at this juncture.
He could indulge them because of his government’s financial and
military dependence on him. In Italy, the essence of the peace of Campo
Formio (17 October 1797) was concession to Austria to secure her
acquiescence in the continued existence of his creations, the Italian
satellite republics. These had already begun to appear in 1796. At
first it had suited the convenience of the French army to hand over
Lombardy to a body of Italians termed a ‘Central Administration’.
Revolutions at Reggio and Modena had followed; Bonaparte indulged
the rebels and, ignoring the wishes of his government, allowed the
formation of the Cispadane Republic from Modena and the Legations
of Bologna and Ferrara (October 1796). In June 1797 the future of
Genoa was settled by the creation of the Ligurian Republic. On 15
July, the Cispadane was united with Lombardy to form the Cisalpine
Republic. When it had been enlarged by the former Venetian territory
west of the Adige and the Valtelline, the Cisalpine stood complete as
the first great essay in Italian consolidation. Bonaparte had justified
his boast to the Cisalpine National Guard that ‘it is the soldier who
founds republics’. (He had gone on to warn them that ‘it is the soldier
who maintains them’.)
The Directory unwillingly ratified the treaty of Campo Formio and
soon afterwards appointed Bonaparte to the command of the Army of
England, a post in which a vaulting ambition might easily o’er-leap
itself. But the major achievements of his proconsulate in Italy remained
as political facts: the extinction of the Republic of Venice and the
consolidation of North Italy in a republican form. There also re-
mained the presence of the French army. The effects of the revolution,
therefore, did not end with the removal of Bonaparte. The experience of
French domination which followed it was just as decisive in shaping the
views of Italians. They were now to suffer from the Directory’s un-
certainty about its real aims in Italy, from its repeated changes of its
commanders and its inability to control them, and from the evidence
which soon began to appear that Campo Formio was not to be a final
settlement and that war might begin again.
The most important signs of danger were a new and harsh treaty of
alliance which bound the Cisalpine more tightly than ever to France,
and the appearance of the Roman Republic as a new satellite in February
1798. Its creation was a clear breach of the Campo Formio settlement;
so was the absorption of Piedmont into France in December 1798.
Together with the foundation of the Parthenopaean Republic at Naples
in January 1799, this completed the subjection of almost the whole of
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Italy to republican institutions; even oligarchic Lucca had been purged
and reformed on democratic lines (2-4 February 1799). The con-
stitutions of the new republics, allowing for local differences of detail
and nomenclature, were roughly that of France under the constitution
of the year III. 1 Nearly all of them began with a declaration of rights
and included specific guarantees of property. Qualifications for citizen-
ship varied but sovereignty was said to reside in the general will of the
citizen body. This sovereignty sustained a bi-cameral legislature which
in turn elected what was in effect an Executive Directory (although its
members were called consuls in Rome and archons in Naples). Local
administration was organised in departments which were divided into
cantons or districts; these were then further divided into communes.
The policies of these republics varied scarcely more than their structure;
much was said about revolutionary legislation but not very much was
done. The abolition of nobility and of legal institutions such as entails
( fideicommessi ) which supported it, the secularisation of ecclesiastical
property and guarantees to its purchasers, the removal of the ecclesi-
astical monopoly of education and the introduction of the republican
calendar were all ideologically acceptable, but were neither intended to
carry a social revolution very far nor had time to do so. In some parts
of Italy such innovations had been anticipated by the rule of the
enlightened absolutists.
Moreover, the new states lacked power. In most of them the social
foundations of republicanism were too narrow for real innovation; the
Cisalpine probably achieved the widest acceptance if not allegiance, but
Madame de Stael remarked that at Rome only the statues were re-
publican. The loyalty of the peasants and lazzaroni to the Neapolitan
Bourbons is notorious but nowhere did the masses support the new
regimes. Lack of popular support explains the feebleness with which the
republics resisted their overthrow in 1799. This lack sprang from their
ambiguous relations with the French; ultimately the republics depended
upon French military protection for their survival, yet the protecting
power used them as its instruments for the exploitation of their subjects.
The new states brought only taxation and a calendar which was in-
comprehensible and offensive to the superstitious; the protection of
inventions by patent legislation or the award of bonuses to the fathers
of ten children was mere tinkering with the latent demands of Italian
society. 2 The republicans offered nothing to the illiterate peasant
masses; Jacobin propaganda could never move the countryman so
much as the sermons of his parish priest. The true republicans were
always an unrepresentative minority of Italians. Even more untypical
1 Eight are printed in Le costituzioni italiane, ed. A. Aquarone, M. d’Addio, G. Negri
(Milan, 1958).
* E.g. the Neapolitan Constitution, Art. 401 ; and the Ligurian, Art. 379.
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were those who became unitarists under the influence of republican
institutions or French exploitation. When the Italian republicans
enjoyed office it was without real power. They were not allowed
independence in any important matter, they were checked and thwarted
by French generals and diplomatic agents who intrigued against them
with other Italians and, if necessary, brought them to heel by a coup
d’etat. The Directory in Paris sometimes disapproved of particular
acts by its agents but was quite firm about their general function; it
urged its ambassadors in Italy to consider themselves as the overseers
of the actions of the governments to which they were accredited. Thus
hampered, the Italians had to levy contributions for the French army,
and therefore to incur the odium of the tax-gatherer for the benefit of
the Grande Nation. Unable to remedy the financial and economic weak-
ness of their own states, they could do nothing to win the confidence of
the French; their conquerors picked and chose nervously among them,
only too willing to mistake independence and integrity for anti-French
or unitarist feeling. Almost from the start, the republics were doomed.
The French were, it is true, unnecessarily nervous. Their correspond-
ence for these years contains more and more references to the unitaire
danger, and the Cisalpine certainly contained many anti-French
patriots, because refugees had been drawn to Milan from all over Italy,
and especially from Venetia whose abandonment to the Austrians had
been bitterly resented. Yet in the last resort the Italian revolutionaries
could not afford to desert their oppressive patrons. The French were,
after all, the representatives of die great Republic which was the
champion of the Revolution against the powers of the old regime.
When the French occupation at last collapsed in 1799 only one of the
unitarists, the Cisalpine general La Hoz, could bring himself to join the
allies against the French. The other Italian ‘Jacobins’, though they
might be bitter and might belong to secret organisations like the Raggi,
stood by the republican cause represented by the French army. The
mobs which attacked the retreating French were led by priests and
nobles, not by the Italian Jacobins.
When the last satellite republic, the Parthenopaean, appeared, the
Second Coalition had already taken shape. The Neapolitan govern-
ment, despite British misgivings but under the influence of British
successes at Aboukir and Port Mahon, had invaded the Roman
Republic after allying itself secretly to Austria (and subsequently to
Great Britain and Russia). After the attack on Rome the French
declared war, and General Championnet entered Naples on 23 January.
The royal family fled to Sicily, and Championnet sought to emulate
Bonaparte by founding the new republic. After this promising start to
the War of the Second Coalition the French position in Italy soon
crumbled. Moreau had to abandon Milan to Suvorov at the end of
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April. Turin fell and Massena threw himself into Genoa at the beginning
of 1800. The French had quickly abandoned the south, and in their
absence the Parthenopaean Republic came to a tragic end at the hands
of the peasant army of Cardinal Ruffo. By October 1799, when
Bonaparte landed at Frejus, the French armies were divided or bottled
up, the Italians had at Arezzo and Cortona shown themselves utterly
hostile to their former conquerors and all the satellite republics had
collapsed. The short-lived annexation of Piedmont had provoked a
rising there against the French. Now a new period of exile began for the
Italians who were able to escape.
Consolidation among the exiles and a reluctant acceptance of their
dependence on France were the most important consequences of the
restoration of 1799-1800. The occupying allied armies were soon as
unpopular as the French had been, but there is little evidence that any-
one wanted the satellite republics restored. It does not seem that many
Italians thought more about the change of regime than was necessary.
The reactions of the Italian people during these years can rarely be
observed except when they were goaded to resistance by military and
fiscal exactions or incited to turn on their republican fellow-countrymen
by their priests. In any case the restoration was no more than an
episode. In May 1800, the First Consul joined his army at Dijon and
crossed the Great St Bernard. Soon he was in Milan and on 14 June the
battle of Marengo re-established French supremacy in the Po valley.
An armistice of five months was agreed upon and the Austrians fell
back beyond the Mincio. To the disillusionment of many Italian
patriots, Bonaparte set up puppet commissions of government in Milan
and Turin and put Lombardy and Piedmont firmly under the control of
French generals. What his policy for Italy really was, or even whether
he had a policy, are questions much discussed. The circumstances in
which he later talked of his plans for Italy make scepticism permissible.
It is safest to look at what he actually did.
Military victory was soon followed by financial impositions and
diplomatic re-organisation. Peace was finally made with the Austrians
at Luneville (9 February 1801), roughly on the same terms as at Campo
Formio. Except at Rome, where Bonaparte was careful not to disturb
the new Pope Pius VII, and at Naples, too remote for immediate
intervention, new puppet regimes were set up. The core of the new
system of French domination was the big Italian Republic in the north
and the absorption of Piedmont — the entrance to the peninsula — into
France itself. Subsequent territorial changes only accentuated this
direct domination by France.
The war began again in 1803. In the following year came the founda-
tion of the Empire. The Italian Republic became the Kingdom of Italy
and on 26 May 1805 Napoleon was crowned at Milan, uttering the
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traditional formula ‘God has given it to me, woe to him who touches it'
(Dio mi Vha data , guai a chi la tocca). Eugene Beauharnais was installed
as viceroy in the new kingdom and Melzi d’Eril, the Lombard nobleman
who had been the vice-president of the Republic and hitherto the fore-
most coadjutor of Bonaparte, went into retirement. The War of the
Third Coalition brought more changes and by 1811 all Italy had been
re-organised.
The whole peninsula was either a part of the Empire ruled directly
by the emperor or his viceroy, or else a quasi-independent satrapy.
Geographically the re-organisation extended as far as Illyria. Only in
the island of Sicily (where the Bourbons hatched schemes of recovery)
and in that of Sardinia did governments of the old regime survive. In
this re-organisation it is hard to discern anything but opportunism.
Had Napoleon cherished a special policy for Italy, he could have
carried it out. He enjoyed a virtually complete freedom to order the
peninsula as he wished. Had he wanted to do so, he could have united
it; instead, its fate was decided by the conflicting pressures of strategy,
family ambition, cupidity, megalomania, and the interest of France.
These years, nevertheless, were a revolutionary irruption into Italian
history and their significance has been much debated. ‘Our political
history only begins in 1802’ wrote one Napoleonic civil servant many
years later; undoubtedly the importance of the period in government
was enormous. The most lasting impressions may have been in the
territory of the Kingdom of Italy, the biggest state diffusing common
assumptions and institutions yet to appear in the peninsula. But
throughout Italy, in the kingdoms and the provinces of the Empire
alike, the institutions of the French Revolution enjoyed a few years’
unchecked operation. In one way, the period was a restoration of en-
lightened despotism; Napoleonic administration provided a congenial
field of activity for the reforming intellectuals of the Settecento. Zurlo,
Murat’s minister of the Interior, had been minister of finance under the
Bourbons; Prina, the finance minister of the Kingdom of Italy, had been
a Piedmontese bureaucrat. Romagnosi, the legal reformer, was em-
ployed as an adviser on legal and judicial matters by the government of
Beauharnais. There were many others. Members of the administrations
of the revolutionary republics also worked for Napoleon, though not
if they had been unitarists.
Another governmental consequence of the Napoleonic re-organisa-
tion was the introduction of the Codes. With them came the re-
organisation of the judicial system on French lines. Feudalism officially
came to an end in Naples in 1806 and Italy began to acquire new
administrative and legal forms derived from the French departmental
and bureaucratic system which became the model of modernity and
efficiency for many Italians. Conscription, a far less popular institution,
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is often said to have been important in creating a sense of Italian
nationality; it may well be so, but the scholarly examination of the
subject has been neglected by historians. A more obviously admirable
innovation was the conduct of statistical enquiries like those mounted
in France during the Consulate. They reflected a revived concern with
material progress which again recalled the reformers of the previous
century. The Kingdom of Italy began one in 1807 and Murat started
one in 1811. The cadastral survey ( Catasto ) which had been so long
delayed under the Bourbon government was begun at last in 1807.
In one way or another it is certain that thousands of Italians gained
between 1801 and 1814 experience of civil and military functions which
was deeply to colour their views after the restoration (below, p. 431).
Many of the Napoleonic officials were to continue in administration
after 1815. Meanwhile, their practical day-to-day activity did some-
thing to mitigate a dictatorship implied by the government of Italy from
Paris or the emperor’s campaign tent. Napoleon’s control was always
close; the constitutions of the Republic and the Kingdom of Italy had
given only derisory powers to the representative bodies. In Naples,
Murat enjoyed a greater degree of independence only because he was
further away.
It is sometimes said that economic history is the best illustration of
the deliberate subordination of Italian to French interests. It is true
that by 1814 economic life in Italy was at low ebb, but it is not easy to
assess the precise responsibility of Napoleonic government for this.
Economic development had been throttled in the eighteenth century by
political divisions, dependence on small local markets, customs-
charges on goods in transit, currency differences, poor credit facilities
and the survivals of privilege and special interest. The invasion of 1796
had severely damaged such industry as existed. A priori, therefore, the
sort of changes Napoleon made might be expected to have beneficial
effects. One of his most important steps was the consolidation of a
single market of six and a half million people in the Kingdom of Italy.
Beyond its boundaries, the presence of similar legal institutions, the
commercial codes, the decimal currency and better communications all
helped to quicken economic life. Some economic developments had
important social consequences, especially in Lombardy where the land-
sales of the revolutionary era led to an increase in the numbers of small
and middling properties. It has been alleged that a new bourgeoisie
began to consolidate its position at this time, benefiting from the damage
done to the existing class-structure by the inflation of the revolutionary
wars. The precise facts about this are still hard to discover, but there is,
for example, some evidence in Piedmont of the breaking-up of large
properties because nobles were forced to sell land to meet the French
impositions. Both this land and that taken from crown and church
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may have gone to men with money which had been drawn from other
sources. It may be significant that Napoleon allocated one of the three
electoral colleges of the Republic of Italy to the merchants (the other
two were respectively for land-owners and members of the professions),
and at Naples twenty of the hundred seats in the new legislative body
were reserved to them. On the other hand, in spite of these hints of
awareness to new social demands, it is hard to believe that merchants or
manufacturers were either very numerous or very important. In-
complete figures suggest that in 1811 commerce occupied about 3J per
cent of the population of the Kingdom of Italy. Now this was in the
most industrially and commercially advanced region of Italy. In
default of more precise statistical evidence, it is difficult to believe that
so small an occupational group could support a middle class of any
significance. A similar inference may be drawn from the dependence of
taxation on agriculture. In Naples, where this was most marked, it is
not easy to see that land changed hands to any appreciable degree;
Murat was soon complaining that the abolition of feudalism there had
only led to yet further concentration of land in the hands of ex-baroni.
It seems likely, then, that Napoleon’s admirers exaggerated the
quickening of the economic life of the peninsula under his rule, though
their admiration is understandable, especially under the restoration.
Some obvious qualifications can safely be made. In the first place,
although the re-organisation of the peninsula overcame some disruptive
forces, it introduced some new ones. The annexation of Piedmont by
France cut off the Lombard silk-workers from the spinners who had
previously supplied them. Parma was separated from the Reggio wine-
trade and its traditional transit traffic from Lombardy was diverted.
Re-organisation could have unhappy effects even when far away from
Italy; when the Hanse towns were swallowed in 1810, they too were
closed to Lombard goods. The blockade was damaging; Italy lost,
because of it, not only the British imports which had flowed in during
the eighteenth century, but also a big market for raw silk. The effects
of this have been most closely studied in the Kingdom of Italy whose
commercial and industrial life was regulated not only in the interests
of French economic warfare with Great Britain but also by Napoleon’s
desire to help French industrialists. Imports of machinery were dis-
couraged so that Italy might fit into the French system not as a com-
peting manufacturer but as a supplier of raw agricultural produce.
In reverse, manufactured goods were not to be admitted to the Kingdom
of Italy unless they came from the Empire. A commercial treaty in 1808
promised to Empire and Kingdom alike a 50 per cent preference in the
operation of their tariffs and this suited French manufacturers. Their
products gradually replaced the British — though never completely,
thanks to Malta.
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The distortions of economic life which were brought about by these
policies were made worse by direct French impositions. There were, for
example, charges for the upkeep of French troops in the peninsula as
well as the load of armaments that Naples and Milan were expected
to support for themselves. The Kingdom of Italy had also to make a
regular contribution of two and a half million lire a month to the Empire,
and such charges were another load on an over-burdened economy.
Other factors — conscription, sudden and arbitrary changes of customs
operations — could be added to the list of imponderable disadvantages
drawn by Italy from her French connexion.
The evidence of high interest rates seems to show that uncertainty and
imposition made it difficult to get capital for industrial and commercial
development. Precise quantitative evidence is harder to find. Some
good signs existed; the Kingdom of Italy had favourable balances of
trade in 1810 and 1812, but a rise in agricultural exports was the main
support of this. Some of the other figures point to different conclusions.
After 1808 the number of workers in silk declined; that the wool-makers
did not decrease does not count for much because their industry had
never been predominantly an exporting one. The arms industry of
Brescia, certainly, benefited slightly from official demand. But it was
significant that when by 1812 Venetian merchants were looking for
somewhere to invest the money they could no longer employ in trade,
they chose land, almost the only sector of the Italian economy where
good profits resulted from Napoleonic policy. The ports had declined
catastrophically. Genoa, ruined by early invasions and the British
blockade, received a death-blow when the imperial customs system cut
it off from Lombardy. After 1 809 Leghorn was rubbing along on coastal
trade with France. When, in 1808, Ancona and Macerata were joined
to the Kingdom of Italy, their trade with Trieste at once declined; that
port was incorporated in the Empire. Their Levant and Balkan business
was interrupted by the blockade. Naples suffered from this, too; but
she could still enjoy her eighteenth-century export trade in agricultural
produce for France. Only between 1811 and 1813 was the balance of
this trade unfavourable to her.
There were also deeper-rooted obstacles to Italian economic advance
which the Napoleonic period did little to overcome. Italy remained
technically too backward to embark on industrialisation if she could not
import machines and men to teach their use from abroad. In 1811 the
flying shuttle was still unknown in the factories of Salerno. Nor, even
without the blockade, is it clear that there was either the capital or the
entrepreneurial imagination available for big industrial investment.
Finally, a catastrophic wave of bankruptcies in Milan in 1813 was one of
the most damaging effects of the Napoleonic period on the Italian
economy. As the war was now being fought again in Italy itself, pro-
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tests could make themselves heard. On n November Murat swept
away all existing protective legislation and replaced it by a light tariff.
At Milan the consiglio generate di commercio could only protest to
Eugene about economic policy, but this was at least a beginning. At the
end of the Napoleonic era the Italian economy was enfeebled and
retarded, there was no sign of gathering momentum for take-off into
industrial growth, commerce was stagnant and only agriculture had
profited from the effects of Napoleonic strategy and government.
The ideological impact of the Napoleonic regime has already been
touched on by implication. In any assessment of it the relations of
Napoleon with the Church must be examined briefly. He remembered
the hostility of the priest-led peasantry in 1796 and 1799. In 1800
Napoleon’s intentions were shown by a Te Deum in Milan cathedral to
celebrate the liberation of Italy from heretics and infidels; he was going
to allow no repetition of the priest-baiting of the first Cisalpine. He was
always ready to make large concessions to the Papacy in Italy if he could
have what he wanted in France; and he acquiesced in the abrogation of
Leopold’s reforms in Tuscany. When the question of the Concordat
between the Italian Republic and Rome was under discussion, his vice-
president, Melzi d’Eril, found himself forced to make concessions which,
as a good child of the enlightenment, he found dangerous. Later, when
quarrels with the Papacy again led to the abduction of the Pope, Napoleon
only reluctantly abandoned the policy of treating the Church gently. 1 This
has a bearing on the popularity of the regime. The peasants in 1814
showed once more that they remained indifferent or near-indifferent to
changes of government ; none of them sprang to the defence of the crumb-
ling regime but, except in the central and southern regions which were
infested by brigands, neither did they ever react so violently against the
French after 1801 as they had done before. There were a few attacks
on the retreating French and that was all. The policy of clerical
conciliation may have been successful. The lack of opposition by the
traditional governing classes to the Napoleonic regime is more difficult
to explain. Individual interest, local circumstances and real idealism
certainly counted for more than class solidarity. All Italians, it may be
presumed, found the expense and the physical cost of continual warfare
unjustifiable, and the officials and bureaucrats, aware of the sub-
ordination of their views to Paris, may have felt this more than most
groups. Yet they served, and they accepted Napoleonic titles.
It is very hard to assess briefly the contribution of the years between
1793 and 1814 to the later history of Italy and the risorgimento. Because
the political structure under Napoleon was relatively stable, there may
have been time for new habits of mind to harden in a way impossible
1 Napoleon revoked the temporal power on 17 May 1 809. Whenthe bull Quum Memoranda
excommunicated the despoilers of the Church, the annexation of the papal states followed.
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before 1799. The army, officialdom and the new legal codes were
regulating factors which operated all over Italy. The radicals of the
’nineties, with some exceptions and after some early episodes which had
shown Napoleon’s determination to hold them in check, gradually
integrated themselves with the regime. Yet the French were still dis-
liked as the predominant power, and the roots of this went back to the
disillusionments of 1797 and 1798. Some men still hankered after unity,
although 1814 showed how insignificant they were. The later myth
that the risorgimento was rooted in a national consciousness already
evolved before 1814 has little substance. There was some, but not much,
nationalist literature; Cuoco’s book on the Neapolitan revolution of
1799 was its major achievement. There were also secret societies,
looking back to the unitarists of 1798-9, but often limited by an attitude
of simple opposition to the French and incapable of organising a
positive nationalist programme.
Only two areas lay outside the common experiences of these years:
Sicily and Sardinia. The latter was really an untouched survival from
the ancien regime and showed it by its hostility to the Piedmontese
servants of Charles Emmanuel. The experience of Sicily was different,
and important for its later history. Always separatist in tendency, the
island’s feeling of independence was accentuated after 1806 by the
presence of a court in exile. This encouraged the constitutional
obstreperousness of the Sicilian grandees, who still remembered the
attempts of Neapolitan viceroys to curb their privileges in the previous
century. The result was that the Neapolitan court became obsessed by
Maria Carolina’s suspicions of plots between the British and the parlia-
mentary party of the barons. These men were moved by a mixture of
local patriotism, class interest, superficial constitutional and liberal
ideas, and taste for intrigue; the presence of the British brought them
together and made them look like a nationalist movement. For their
part, the British soldiers on the spot thoroughly distrusted Maria
Carolina, and things became worse when Bentinck was sent out to
advise the Bourbons in 1811. The British government simply wanted a
Sicily quiescent enough to serve as a base for operations. Bentinck was
therefore instructed to warn the court that it could not hope for British
support against the Sicilian population if it unwisely persisted in re-
fusing constitutional reform. He was also given control of the subsidy
paid to the court and had as a last resort the power to theaten the
withdrawal of the British garrison. Maria Carolina’s trouble-making
at last drove Bentinck into using his powers to force her withdrawal
from the island. The king had by this time granted a constitution drafted
on English lines along with some features of the Spanish constitution
of 1812; it was hoped that this would provide settled government.
Unfortunately the constitutional movement now disintegrated and
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Bentinck became virtually a dictator, thus, ironically, inheriting the role
of the eighteenth-century viceroys.
The constitutional ferment and the propaganda in favour of reform
conducted in Sicily by the British made it seem in 1813 that there was a
chance of launching from the island a movement of Italian liberation;
Bentinck hoped to do this. Unfortunately the game was already out of
his hands by the beginning of 1814. After the failure of the Moscow
campaign, Eugene had led the army back across the Elbe and had then
returned to Italy. He rejected a suggestion from Murat that they should
together try to come to terms with the allies and instead made ready to
defend the peninsula. After Leipzig Austria could deploy large forces
in Italy and by February 1814 Eugene had been forced back across the
Mincio. Murat had meanwhile come to an understanding with his
enemies. Yet at this time it still seemed possible that Italy might sur-
vive the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire, preserving its new institu-
tions and independent of further foreign intervention. It was even
possible that Eugene himself might become the king of a new north
Italian State based on the Napoleonic kingdom. At least until Murat
threw him self into the war on their side, the Austrians did not exclude
this possibility. But when Murat at last turned on him Eugene had to
come to terms in the armistice of Schiarino Rizzino (16 April). One of
its provisions was that an Italian deputation should be sent to Paris
to present its views on the future of the kingdom. Disastrously, the
Lombard liberals led by Confalonieri chose this moment to make the
grave and compromising mistake of supporting a rising in Milan. The
exact origins of the riot which followed are obscure, but one of Eugene’s
ministers was lynched and he himself withdrew to Bavaria. Certainly
some of those who took part wanted to put Murat on the throne and
others were deluded by hopes of British support. What they did, in
spite of the brief appearance of a provisional government at Milan,
was to put the game firmly in the hands of the Austrians. Milan was
occupied and when Confalonieri and his friends reached Paris they were
told that Lombardy was to be Austrian.
The Milanese liberals had not been alone in mis-judging the situation;
some of them had been egged on by Bentinck, who hoped they would
play a part in his schemes for Italy. As soon as he landed at Leghorn
(9 March), he advocated an independent constitutional state for Italy,
quarrelled violently with Murat, who had occupied Tuscany, and pro-
claimed the re-establishment of the Genoese Republic although his
instructions were to occupy it in the name of the King of Sardinia.
‘Be Italians,’ he urged, and his words alarmed his government. ‘He
seems bent on throwing all Italy loose’ wrote Castlereagh; this dis-
approval meant that Bentinck was bound to fail and that his Italian
friends would be left without support. British policy towards liberal
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and national movements was cooling quickly in the spring of 1814.
Frightened by what he heard from Italy and acting in what he believed
to be the interests of European order, Castlereagh was fully prepared to
support Austrian action in Italy and was not going to go beyond this,
whatever Bentinck might say. The Austrians, who had been jolted by
the Milan rising out of an earlier moderation in which they had only
envisaged recovering lands east of the Mincio, were thus left free to
deal as they liked with Murat.
Murat had come to terms with them in January. In return for attack-
ing Eugene he was guaranteed his crown and an accession of territory
containing nearly half a million people from the former papal states.
This agreement had been the basis of his actions in March and April,
and he had performed his part of the contract. But he had done so
hesitatingly and half-heartedly. Also, during the advance into the
northern half of the peninsula, he had allowed his officers to try to whip
up support for a nationalist programme. With his troops in possession
of half Italy his position seemed strong; even Castlereagh was pre-
pared to acquiesce in the agreement with the Austrians if some decent
compensation could be found for the Neapolitan Bourbons. Un-
fortunately, Murat did not believe that this was British policy; he could
only see the actions of Bentinck, which seemed to be as much directed
against himself as against Eugene. He therefore dallied and intrigued
again with Eugene and this weakened his position when, at Vienna, the
newly restored Bourbons of France began to remember the Neapolitan
branch of the family. At the Congress, Murat’s emissaries could not
obtain a hearing. He was, in fact, solely dependent upon the good-will
of Austria since the British would not oppose Austrian policy in Italy.
Even then, he might have kept his throne had he not gone back on his
undertakings when Napoleon escaped from Elba. Seeking a quick
success, Murat invaded the papal states and turned out the Grand
Duke of Tuscany. On 30 March 1815 he issued at Rimini the famous
proclamation whose summons to defend the cause of Italian liberty met
with so little response. It was not enough. He could not cross the Po,
turned south again and was finally defeated in May. After this Austria
had no further obligations towards him. He left Italy on 19 May
and with him went the last chance of an Italian solution to the Italian
problem.
The pattern of the restoration was determined by these failures. Its
basis was a reinforced Austrian predominance in the peninsula. The
keystone of this supremacy was the new Kingdom of Lombardy and
Venetia. This left Austria in a stronger strategical position than ever
before. Within her provinces a pedantic but dependable bureaucracy,
smaller than the Napoleonic, governed the country with the support of
the army. Many of the Napoleonic officials were dismissed. Austrian
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judicial procedure was re-introduced but the French commercial code
remained substantially intact and all alienations of property carried out
under the fallen regime were at once given legal recognition (n May
1815). The provinces enjoyed as little autonomy as had Lombardy
under Joseph II, and a customs-barrier separated them at the Mincio.
The viceroy rarely heeded the major tax-payers who formed the pro-
vincial and communal administration. He carried out a policy made in
Vienna which included tariffs in favour of Austria and heavier taxation
to pay for an elaborate police and censorship.
The Austrian predominance was expressed elsewhere in the peninsula
by Austrian garrisons and dynastic connexion. Two states were directly
ruled by Habsburgs. In Parma Marie-Louise was installed, with her
paramour, Neipperg, as counsellor. At her death the duchy was to
revert to the Parmesan Bourbons. Tuscany was ruled by Ferdinand III
and he was also to have the reversion of Lucca when the Bourbons left
it to go back to Parma. Tiny San Marino was the only republic to
survive. The Papal States were restored and the Kingdom of Naples
re-appeared as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The Kingdom of
Sardinia swallowed Genoa and the rest of the former Ligurian Republic,
and regained Nice, Savoy and Piedmont. In Modena, Francis IV was
put back and it was arranged that Massa-Carrara should be added to
his territories when its ruler, his mother, died.
It is not easy to generalise about these regimes. Each reflected the
interplay of local factors, the strength or weakness of Napoleonic
achievements, the lessons or the bitterness of exile. No two were
exactly alike, and all of them were carefully watched by an Austrian
government as anxious to avoid provoking opposition as to crush it
when provoked. Although none of them could progress freely towards
reform, each could choose for itself how far it would go back towards
the old regime, and few did not find some part of the Napoleonic
structure to preserve. In the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies Metteraich
had in 1815 made stipulations to Ferdinand I about the nature of the
restoration. There were to be no extreme measures of repression, no
repudiation of the public debt, no cancellation of Murat’s pension and
titles, and a secret treaty provided that there should be no constitutional
change without Austrian approval. Since there was a great fund of
popular loyalism at Naples and little support for Murat, the restored
regime succeeded at first in being sensible and moderate. The Napoleonic
Codes were maintained, feudalism was not restored. Napoleonic per-
sonnel stayed in office and the independence of Sicily was respected. A
change came after Murat’s unsuccessful attempt to invade the kingdom
and his execution in October 1815. Canosa, the minister of police,
launched a series of measures against liberals and adherents of Murat.
In December 1816 the two kingdoms were again united and all
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independent Sicilian institutions destroyed; the British presence had
encouraged the Sicilian constitutionalists to over-play their hand but the
British garrison had been withdrawn in 1815. One of the most striking
confirmations of the government’s anti-liberal tendency was the
Concordat of 1818 which made concessions to the Papacy inconceivable
in eighteenth-century Naples. But a new Code of 1819 kept the
Napoleonic legal reforms.
In the Papal States, Cardinal Consalvi had hoped that the return of
the Legations and the Marches would make possible some reform of
the governmental structure. His aims were centralisation and the
introduction of more laymen into government. Although the restored
regime was not harsh and the Motu Proprio of 6 July 1816 did not
sweep away all Napoleonic innovations, these hopes were thwarted.
Tuscany was different, a liberal oasis. Under Ferdinand III, the laws of
Leopold I were re-introduced and they had been as enlightened and
efficient as the Napoleonic. Free trade retained official favour in
Tuscany at a time when it was elsewhere distrusted as political liberalism.
Tuscany was the only state not to admit within its borders the revived
society of Jesus, and in Florence there began to appear a liberal in-
tellectual elite which was to contribute importantly to the later
risorgimento. Parma, too, avoided retrogression and retained the Codes
and administrative practice of the Napoleonic period. In Modena,
although Francis IV quickly established an unenviable reputation as
a miserly reactionary and repealed many French innovations, there was
no restoration of feudal law or fideicommessi. In the Kingdom of
Sardinia the reaction was formally complete; the king and court re-
entered Turin in the pig-tails and tricorns of the previous century.
Government was restored to the hands of the ‘pure’, remarked Balbo
later, and the ‘pure’ were those who had done nothing for fifteen
years. Mediocrity was now firmly in the saddle and those who had
shown ability under Napoleon were shunned as moral lepers. But
because the monarchy was popular and could rely on local patriotism
it did not need to be harsh. Nor can Sardinia really be thought of as a
purely Italian state; the cultural influence of France was bound to be
felt there under any regime. After a moment’s hesitation, the Napoleonic
currency was maintained, though the Codes were not. Moreover, Victor
Emmanuel distrusted Austrian designs on Piedmontese territory. His
was the one state free or almost free from Austrian influence at the
restoration.
Such divergencies make it difficult to generalise about the restorations.
Nowhere was there a complete reaction and nowhere was there any
violent resistance; the presumption must be that few Italians were much
disturbed. Particularism and mercantilism were again in fashion. Yet,
although restoration was accomplished without much difficulty, evi-
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dence of discontent soon began to appear. Some connexions have been
traced between the liberal movements of the restoration and such anti-
French movements of the revolutionary era as the Raggi. These had
been followed under Napoleon by other secret societies of which the
most famous is the Carbonari. This organisation, beginning in Naples
as an anti-Bourbon movement, had become anti-Muratist at the change
of regime and had then reverted to anti-Bourbon activity at the restora-
tion. During the suppression of brigandage it had spread all over the
south and in 1814 Murat’s invasion had taken it into the Romagna.
It was to dominate the Italian conspiracies of the restoration and had
led to the creation of such other societies as the Piedmontese Federati.
The aims and social composition of its lodges varied from place to place.
In Naples it was increasingly drawn from the fairly well-off. In the
Papal States it was secular and anti-theocratic. In Piedmont the con-
spirators envisaged working through a member of the Piedmontese
royal house. The lodges lent themselves to varied uses; blackmail,
intimidation and ‘protection’ were co mm on in Naples. The story of the
secret societies is still very obscure; much remains to be discovered
about them. The operation of such anti-liberal secret societies as the
Calderari complicates the picture still further.
Other impulses to disaffection arose, not from secret societies with
years of plotting behind them, but from simple disappointment with the
restoration. This was above all true in Lombardy where the group of
young men about Confalonieri and his newspaper, the Conciliatore,
linked the constitutional aspirations of liberals to plans for educational
and economic improvement; Confalonieri himself dabbled with Lan-
castrian schools and sponsored the first steamboat to appear on the Po
while at the same time plotting with the Carbonari. The newspaper,
founded in 1817, survived barely a year, yet in that time it provided a
focus for literary and intellectual opposition to Austrian rule. Else-
where there were other special and local reasons for discontent. In the
Papal States, the Romagna felt the contrast between the rule of the
returned Papal legates and that of the Napoleonic administrators. In
the south, Sicilian separatism was revived by the destruction of the 1814
constitutional settlement. All over Italy there were soldiers who were
discontented with enforced idleness. And there was also growing up a
new generation which had grasped the idea of the carriere ouverte aux
talents, the Julien Sorels of Italy. No safety valves were available to
these pressures. The Austrians suppressed the Conciliatore, and
Canosa held down the Kingdom of Naples. Because no institutions
existed through which discontent could be expressed, great symbolic
importance came to be attached to the Spanish constitution of 1812.
In 1820 there broke a wave of disturbances to which many of these
elements powerfully contributed.
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The revolution in Naples had military leadership. Although their
interests had been safeguarded in 1815, many of Murat’s officers felt
that they were being unjustly discriminated against in promotion. The
rivalry of Carbonari and Calderari had led almost to civil war in some
regions and this focused the soldiers’ sense of grievance. The lodges of
the Carbonari formed a link between them and the middling land-
owners who ran most of the lodges. In so far as they were defined, the
aims of the Carbonari were limited monarchy, administrative reform,
the continuation of the assault on feudalism and the abandonment of
mercantilism. Occasionally there were hints of a more active Carbonar-
ist interest in land-reform. In 1820 the soldiers and Carbonari suddenly
came together because of circumstance ; in the long run this was a source
of weakness but it produced the Neapolitan revolution.
In Naples the repressive measures of the regime reached a climax in
May and June 1820. In Spain there had been a successful revolution
in January and for the moment it did not look as if the powers were
going to intervene there; perhaps, then, there was reason to think they
would not intervene if a rising took place in Naples. Spain was also
connected with Naples through Ferdinand. He had a claim to the
inheritance of the Spanish throne; to maintain his rights there he had
taken an oath to maintain the 1812 constitution and, if he could do this
in Spain, why could he not also swear to uphold a Neapolitan con-
stitution? On 2 July there was a mutiny in the garrison at Nola, and
the local Carbonari supported it. The garrison at Capua joined in the
next day and General Pepe assumed the leadership of the rebels. The
government soon gave in and promised a constitution on the Spanish
model. A new ministry, consisting of former sympathisers with Murat,
was set up, but contained no members of the Carbonari; this was
important, for the lodges were the only effective popular or semi-
popular support available to liberals. Pepe was the only real link
between the ministry and the Carbonari.
It was not surprising that the Neapolitan revolution should have been
followed a week later by a Sicilian separatist rising. Its disorders soon
alarmed the possessing classes in the island, which was paralysed dur-
ing the summer while the revolution was contained by the aristocracy
and members of the corporations. The rebels were weakened by the
rivalry of Palermo (where the original outbreak had taken place) with
Messina, and they finally capitulated in September. When, on 1 October,
the new parliament met at Naples it contained no Sicilian deputies. It
supported a Carbonarist ministry deluded by the belief that Great
Britain would, if necessary, intervene to protect Neapolitan con-
stitutionalism and by confidence in Ferdinand’s word.
Unfortunately the attitude of Great Britain towards intervention was
that it was not objectionable if Austria acted alone. After the prelimin-
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ary protocol of Troppau (Chapter XXV, pp. 676-7), Ferdinand lied
himself into being allowed to present the Neapolitan case to the allies
and, as soon as he was safely at Genoa on a British cruiser, disavowed
all his concessions. He asked formally for assistance at Laibach. The
Neapolitan government had been much weakened militarily by the
absence of many of their soldiers in Sicily, and morally by the split
which now divided the Muratist officers from the Carbonarist politicians.
General Pepe was defeated by an Austrian army which on 23 March
entered the capital. The restoration had been accomplished quickly and
not very bloodily. Afterwards only two liberals were executed although
many went into exile. In May an amnesty was offered to all except the
original mutineers. The revolution had failed because of the divisions
among the revolutionaries themselves, because of the distraction of the
Sicilian revolt (which gave its last kick at Messina in March 1821),
because of its lack of agreed aims, because of Ferdinand’s duplicity, but
above all because the powers acquiesced in the use of the Austrian army
against it. Had the revolution succeeded, it might have blocked the way
to unification by creating a constitutional state with a particular interest
in survival. By failing, it contributed powerfully to the mythology of the
risorgimento and to the growing number of exiles. Above all, it clearly
associated Austria with the preservation not merely of a divided Italy
but of anti-liberal governments. The Austrian army remained at
Naples until 1827.
In 1821 there was also a revolution in Piedmont which had a strongly
military character. Its leaders were officers and members of the court
circles; it was a pronunciamiento rather than a popular rising. There
was an attempt to co-operate with the Federati — as at Naples, the secret
societies offered the only access to wider support — and this gave the
revolution a general bias towards liberal constitutionalism whether or
not the plotters were agreed in their particular aims. The Neapolitan
revolution and the Austrian intervention brought the movement to a
head and gave it a patriotic and anti-Austrian colour; this meant that
the attitude of the crown was uncertain. One member of the royal
family, Charles Albert, Prince of Carignano, knew about the con-
spiracy: even if active royal support was not forthcoming, it was hoped
that he would mediate between the king and the plotters.
In January, agitation among students in Turin led to reprisals which
intensified the demand for constitutional reform. On 10 March, after
two or three days of ambiguous discussions between Charles Albert
and the plotters, the outbreak came. Officers of the garrison seized
control of Alessandria. In Turin that evening the royal council was
ready to concede constitutional reforms when news arrived from
Laibach of the decisions of the Congress. A few days later the citadel at
Turin was seized by revolutionaries and Victor Emmanuel, unable to
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bring himself to crush the rebellion, abdicated. The heir apparent,
Charles Felix, was in Modena; Charles Albert regarded himself as
empowered to act as regent and swore loyalty to the Spanish con-
stitution (15 March), with the aim, he later said, of maintaining order.
On 20 March Charles Felix ordered him to Novara, where he was
arrested. The intervention of the Austrian army followed and the
rising was over. Again, the decisive force had been Austrian and the
revolutionaries had suffered from internal divisions and uncertainty
about their ultimate aims. As at Naples, the movement suffered from a
fundamental lack of popular support; Balbo wrote that public opinion
was neither for nor against it. Metternich was not far wrong; the
rebellion was ‘une terrible confusion’. The idea of mutiny was in itself
offensive to the traditions of the Piedmontese army.
The long-term results of this failure were not serious for Piedmont’s
future. An Austrian occupation meant a growth in anti-Austrian feel-
ing although for some time Charles Felix felt more inclined than before
to trust his neighbours across the Ticino. The eclipse of Charles Albert
and the foundation of his reputation for unreliability were by-products
important for the later history of Italy. The administration and police
were purged. But probably the mythical and personal legacy of the
movement was its most important effect. Mazzini became a patriot when
he saw the Piedmontese exiles of 1821 on their way out through Genoa.
The events in Piedmont and Naples encouraged repression elsewhere.
In the Papal States, although the Legations were a hotbed of secret
organisations, there had been no outbreaks — a tribute, perhaps, to
Consalvi’s wisdom — and not much was done until the death of Pius VII
and the accession of the fiercely reactionary Leo XII in 1823. Some of
the changes which followed were tragic, as when the Jews were deprived
of many of their civil rights; some were ludicrous, for instance the
dissolution of the board supervising vaccination. Consalvi was replaced
as Secretary of State; Cardinal Rivarola was sent to the Legations to
tame them and stamp out the secret societies. An attempt was made on
his life in 1825; executions followed but things had not improved when
Pius VIII, another zealot, succeeded to the Papal throne in 1829.
Meanwhile, in the Two Sicilies Francis I had become king in 1825 and,
although the Austrian government succeeded in obtaining the dis-
missal of Canosa, trials and investigations went on relentlessly. The
secret societies survived in spite of them.
Elsewhere, governments were milder, although in Lombardy the
revolutionary crisis had brought to light the connexions of liberals with
movements outside the province. A series of important political trials
began. First, eight death sentences were pronounced on men dis-
covered to be connected with the Carbonari. None was carried out but
the conditions of imprisonment of the condemned men became more
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ITALY
rigorous after the outbreak of the revolution at Naples. Then came the
trial of a group which included Silvio Pellico, the former editor of the
Conciliatore. More arrests and interrogations followed. Finally, after
the Piedmontese revolution there was another trial in which Con-
falonieri himself was among those in the dock; he had hoped to support
the Piedmontese with a rising in Lombardy. One of the prisoners under
interrogation also gave away the connexion of the Lombard conspirators
with a movement at Genoa. These trials effectively finished conspiracy
and secret organisation in Lombardy for some years. They are interest-
ing because the social position of noblemen like Confalonieri and
Axrivabene shows how quickly disillusionment with Austrian rule had
come to the Lombard upper class. The prisoners became national
martyrs. Their sentences, which seemed cruelly heavy, were to be major
contributions to the mythology of the risorgimento in the poems of
Berchet and in Pellico’s Le Mie Prigioni. But in spite of this living
evidence of tyranny, the repression gradually ebbed elsewhere. In 1824
Charles Albert was re-admitted to his rights of succession in Piedmont.
In Parma there had been a few trials to please Metternich, but Marie-
Louise either pardoned everyone or reduced their sentences. Even the
badly shaken Francis IV of Modena did not carry out any of the forty
death sentences his courts pronounced. Tuscany after the succession of
Leopold II in 1824 became milder than ever and Metternich was
continually protesting about the toleration of liberals there. One of the
symbols of that toleration was the publication of Vieusseux’s Antologia
which had begun in 1820 to provide a focus for literary and academic
patriotism; the first publication of Cattaneo appeared in its pages and
almost the last of Romagnosi.
The artificiality of the dates 1793 and 1830 and the diversity which
still marked the peninsula at its end make it hard to characterise the
general significance of the period in Italian history. Economic change
had been unspectacular. The industrial pattern had hardly begun to
change since 1815 ; only in 1817 did Biella get its first power looms. For
most Italians, economic life still meant agriculture; its forms had only
been slightly modified by Napoleonic legislation and sales of land. The
rudimentary communications of the peninsula in 1830 still strangled it;
grain in Naples could cost thirty lire a hectolitre while in the Basilicata
it could not be sold for eight. Rural poverty was still untouched and the
evidence of mendicity figures in Naples shows it was getting worse. In
the north, too, Pugliese’s great study of the Vercellese 1 has detected
the beginnings of the decline in peasant well-being which was to
characterise the Italian nineteenth century. There was little to offset this
growing incubus of rural poverty. There was, certainly, interest in new
economic forms and ideas — already in 1816 there had appeared the last
1 S. Pugliese, Due secoli di vita agricola (Turin, 1908).
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of the fifty volumes of Custodi’s Economisti classici italiani— but this
was not yet changing the structure of society. The founding of insurance
companies and savings banks was a beginning, and the concern with
new agricultural techniques was striking, but no new directing class had
yet emerged and the traditional rulers still held the reins. In spite of a
slight change in the pattern of land-owning, the nobles were still
dominant. They had been forced to accommodate themselves to a new
Napoleonic nobility which had grown up beside them, its position con-
solidated by the institution of new entails; but other classes hardly
counted. The masses did not share such national and political con-
sciousness as existed and, although the expansion of the literate admin-
istrative class between 1793 and 1830 may have been important, this
class tended to take up employment in the restored regimes and adapt
itself to them.
Speculation about the effect of the political and legal changes of these
years brings us back to the question which has preoccupied Italian
historians: ‘what is the relation of these years to the risorgimento? .
The question still has some importance because of the link between
politics and historical mythology in Italy. Recent work on the later
phases of the risorgimento, with its emphasis on the play of Piedmontese
ambition and diplomatic circumstance, makes it seem that the con-
tribution of the earlier period was above all ideological, the growing
self-consciousness of some Italians vis-a-vis different sorts of foreigner
being its central feature. There is political evidence enough of this,
beginning with Buonarroti and his cronies and going on to the feeling
against Austria after 1815. But such a nationalist reading of the purely
political evidence must leave out a great deal. There is, for example, a
strong tradition of local grievance which is entirely irrelevant to the
national liberal interest; Sicily is the glaring example. There is also the
willing service of many Italians to the foreign regimes. They stood in a
tradition of cosmopolitan allegiance to efficient government which goes
back to the eighteenth-century reformers. Men like Melzi and Prina
were among the most enlightened and progressive in Italian society
and they had little doubt where the true interest of their countrymen
lay.
Yet the evidence of opposition to the foreigner cannot just be argued
away; a mythology quickly grew up around it and itself became one of
the social and political realities shaping the outlook of the first genera-
tion of the risorgimento. This mythology — whose essence was the
identification of national with liberal aspirations — drew upon such
diverse sources as Jacobin propaganda, Napoleonic administration, the
poetry of Berchet and Foscolo and the schemes of economic improve-
ment of Gioia and Confalonieri. It is true that only a minority was
aware of it and that the greatest Italian writer of the age, Manzoni, in
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ITALY
spite of his personal and political sympathies for the Lombard liberals,
limited his own political activity to writing the Proclama di Rimini
after Murat’s abortive attempt in 1815 and II cinque Maggio after hear-
ing of Napoleon’s death. It was also true that he was so much a Milanese
that he only visited Tuscany long after he had gone to Paris and that he
never went south of Florence at all. Nevertheless even he was not
immune to the prevailing ideological trends; it can plausibly be argued
that he contributed as powerfully to Italian nationality, in his generalisa-
tion of Tuscan usage in Italian speech and writing, as any Carbonarist
conspirator.
The ideological importance of the period was connected also with its
length. After it, the generation of eighteenth-century reformers had
almost disappeared. A man who had been twenty in 1793 was nearly
sixty in 1830. Those who grew up under the French were to be the first
leaders of the risorgimento. Some of them survived from the Napoleonic
to the restored bureaucracies. By 1820 there were many men of ’92
and ’93 who were cautious conservatives. Others were not: Santorre di
Santarosa, the hero of the Piedmontese revolution, had been an imperial
sous-prefet and Pepe a Napoleonic brigadier. Among those younger
still, Balbo, bom in 1789, had begun as a Napoleonic civil servant and
Carlo Alberto had been commissioned as a French cavalry officer.
If the imponderable influences of ideology and mythology are dis-
counted, then clearly the objective conditions of nationality were not
present in the Italy of 1830. The most diverse observers were in agree-
ment about this. It is simply not true that ‘the people was no longer a
confused and passive crowd, but rather an organic body, with aspira-
tions and desires which would soon become demands’. 1 The absence of
the masses from the stage was to be marked throughout the risorgimento ;
they certainly did not participate in a national movement before 1830.
Brigandage in the south, mobs attacking French soldiers in 1799 or 1814,
or the lynching of Prina, do not make a national movement though for
some men they focused national issues. 1830 marks no epoch in
Italian history; it divides the nineteenth century in Italy as arbitrarily as
1793 divides the eighteenth. All that can be said of it is that because it
meant something in French history, it gave Italian liberals the hope that
they could again look to France to be the Grande Nation of the inter-
national revolution. A new generation was young enough to have
forgotten the disappointment which followed the first invasion. Pepe
was in 1830 in touch with Lafayette, and in Modena Ciro Menotti was
able to involve Francis IV in his plot by playing on the monarch’s fears
of what the French might now do. Their hopes showed what changes the
revolutionary decades had brought, but also how far Italy had yet to go
before she generated an autonomous national movement.
1 Prof. Segie, in the Cambridge Modern History (1907), vol. x, p. 104.
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A NOTE ON THE MAIN TERRITORIAL CHANGES IN ITALY,
1793-ISM
At the Preliminaries of Leoben (18 April 1797) it was agreed openly
that the Austrian Netherlands should pass to France and secretly that
the emperor should also give up Lombardy. This, together with the
former Venetian territories between the Oglio and the Adda, became the
nucleus of the Cisalpine Republic. The emperor received Dalmatia,
Istria and some of the Venetian Terrafirma. The Venetians were
temporarily awarded the Papal Legations, surrendered to France at
the Peace of Tolentino (19 February 1797) but the emperor received the
remainder of the Venetian Republic east of the Adige at the Peace of
Campo Formio (17 October 1797). The foundation and collapse of the
satellite republics followed. At the Peace of Luneville (9 February 1801)
the Campo Formio terms were virtually repeated. The Austrians recog-
nised the revived Cisalpine Republic which was soon turned into the
Italian Republic. The Ligurian Republic and that of Lucca were re-
vived. Tuscany was given to the son of the Duke of Parma as the
Kingdom of Etruria and was enlarged by the acquisition of the tiny
Stato dei Presidi (28 July 1801). Under the Treaty of Aranjuez, Parma
was occupied by the French at Ferdinand’s death. After the foundation
of the Empire, Genoa, Parma and Piacenza were taken into the Empire,
and Elisa Bacciochi, Napoleon’s sister, was installed in Lucca. By the
Treaty of Pressburg (26 December 1805) Austria surrendered her
Venetian lands. The Kingdom of Italy was extended to the Isonzo and
later acquired the Trentino. Dalmatia and Istria became part of the
Empire. Joseph Bonaparte was placed on the throne of Naples where
he was replaced by Murat in 1808. In 1807 the Kingdom of Etruria
was turned into a grand-duchy for Elisa. In April 1808 the Papal
March of Ancona was absorbed into the Kingdom of Italy and the
annexation of the Papal States followed in 1809. For the changes in
1814-15, see Chapter XXIV, pp. 657-8.
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CHAPTER XVI
SPAIN AND PORTUGAL, 1793 to c. 1840
C onfronted with the problem of regenerating society in decline,
Iberian liberalism professed two conflicting ideals: reform by an
enlightened minority within the traditional constitution, and
radical revolution, deriving its political theory from the sovereignty of
the people. The origins of these programmes must be sought in the later
eighteenth century, when foreign influences were grafted on to the
traditions of earlier diagnosticians of decline. The Iberian Enlighten-
ment, although it revivified intellectual life, was, by European standards,
a derivative and second-rate affair: its significance lies in its influence
on the reforming civil servants who controlled the Spanish monarchy
in the later years of Charles III; whether they drew on outmoded
mercantilism, on more modem physiocratic influences or, later, on the
ideas of Adam Smith, they were committed to the proposition that
civil society was not an unalterable, sacrosanct structure, but sus-
ceptible of rational improvement by legislation based on political
economy. Since their ai m was the increased prosperity of the state, their
emphasis was on useful arts, practical reform, and the elimination of
useless classes, useless scholastic education and economically harmful
charity. Compared with the Spanish reformers, Pombal’s tightening of
effective state control in the interests of increased revenue, effected by
the exertions of an over-worked sole minister, was an old-fashioned
programme, inspired by Colbert. Nevertheless, to the Portuguese
liberals this suspicious autocrat became the picture of the enlightened
reformer.
The reform programme was to be spread all over Spain by govern-
ment-sponsored Patriotic Societies. Their activities were often puerile,
a naive parade of scraps of scientific knowledge picked up in foreign
journals. Nevertheless, these government servants and their local sup-
porters staked out a programme: the recasting of university education
on lines inspired by the regalian claims of the state; the promotion of
public works, by which some provincial capitals were transformed; a
network of roads from Madrid; the rationalisation of administrative
divisions and the removal of obstructions to efficient government
caused by municipal sloth and corruption and by provincial privilege.
Apart from a few deists they were not heterodox, least of all were they
revolutionaries. The monarchy was their instrument, ‘the principal
nerve of reform’, its historical powers unchallenged as long as its utility
was unquestioned. By 1809 this had changed. The feebleness of the
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monarchy and the traditional institutions in the crisis of 1 808 produced a
widespread, though imprecise, demand for a constitution. Even more
dangerous were the beginnings of a radical tradition, in spite of
Floridablanca’s (and in Portugal Manique’s) efforts to hinder intellectual
intercourse with France. 1 We can detect these beginnings in the
haphazard and unco-ordinated activities of small groups of radicals in
the university of Salamanca, in Picomell’s republican conspiracy in
Madrid (1795), in odd pamphlets picked up by the Inquisition in
provincial towns. The war produced a peace party in which Godoy
found the origins of later liberalism and which could greet the French
ambassador with cries of ‘Vive la Liberte’. In 1800 Southey found
unpaid Portuguese sailors rioting for liberty and Bonaparte. These
radicals were to turn a vague demand for reform into the precise liberal
programme of the Cortes of Cadiz in Spain (1810) and the events of
1820 in Portugal.
What elements of a modem society, on the pattern of the Enlighten-
ment and later liberalism, existed in Spain and Portugal ? The Spanish
aristocracy appeared a declining class. Its economic position was under
attack, its political influence in eclipse and its scale of values challenged.
Apart from court office, the higher aristocracy had lost political power,
in Portugal through Pombal’s violent onslaught on the old families, in
Spain by laziness and disdain which left the chores of administration to
legally trained civil servants coming from the ranks of lower nobility.
Unlike the French monarchy, the Spanish Bourbons resisted all attempts
to reverse this process. 2 Though aristocrats were prominent in the
intellectual revival, its climate was hostile to the aristocratic values and
interests. Violent literary attacks on a useless aristocracy were the
echo of French polemics or the work of the bureaucrats of the lower
nobility rather than the onslaught of an excluded bourgeoisie. Entail
was attacked as an economic ‘ hindrance ’ rather than as a class privilege.
Political economists argued that entail was the greatest single deterrent
to prosperous agriculture since by starving the market of land it made
profitable investment in agriculture impossible. The nobles’ hold on
municipal government, the jurisdictional powers of their senorios, were
attacked as administrative inconveniences, and in Valencia and Aragon,
where feudal payments were onerous, as social injustices. There was no
clearly defined estate to protect noble interests: in the north the con-
ception of nobility was diffuse, including nearly the total population of
the Basque Provinces. 3 With the weakening of the diffused conception
of nobility the titled aristocracy was afforced in the nineteenth century
by the soldiers, bankers and lawyers of the liberal world. These accre-
1 R. Herr, The Eighteenth Century Revolution in Spain (Princeton, 1958), pp. 239-376.
8 V. Rodriguez Casado, Politico interior de Carlos ///(Valladolid, 1950), pp. 24-36.
8 A. Dominguez Ortiz, La sociedad espahola en el siglo XVIII (Madrid, 1955), pp. 77 ~ 12 3 -
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tions revived and strengthened the social and political influence of
the aristocracy. Thus, whereas a House of Lords was inconceivable in
the atmosphere of 1809, a second chamber, including a hereditary
aristocracy, was a constant feature of later conservative-liberal con-
stitutions.
‘The real power in Spain’, wrote Wellington, ‘is the clergy.’ This
power was deserved. The Spanish Church was a democratic institution:
a primate was the son of a charcoal burner, the episcopate respectable
and charitable. As a charitable institution and as an employer of
labour, it had a direct hold on the poorer classes: but its profound
influence derived from its intimate connection with all forms of social
life. This popularity weakened in the larger towns as the anti-clerical
riots and church burnings of the 1820’s and 1834-6, unthinkable
twenty years before, reveal. To Oliveira Martins, Portugal had been
forced by generations of Jesuit education into superstition and hypocrisy,
sharpened into hysteria by economic distress: Pombal’s attack on the
Jesuits strengthened rather than weakened popular faith which fed the
‘white demagogy’ of Miguelism. It was the attack on the Church as a
political institution in the interests of the crown which produced Spanish
‘Jansenism’, the regalian controversy, which touched schism in 1800,
and the attack on the Church’s hold over education; it was the Church’s
position as an economic institution that led to attacks on mortmain,
‘sterile’ monks and convent soup. Nevertheless, the conflict between
the liberals and the Church was not merely a product of economic
reform. It was forced on the liberals by the violence of the Church’s
reaction to new ideas; nothing new could be absorbed by a moribund
scholastic system; all must be rejected. If liberals wanted any kind of
progressive society they could not refrain from defensive action; even
Jovellanos, a pious Catholic, was embittered by the Inquisition’s attempt
to ruin his educational reforms. A minority of radicals in Spain and
Portugal relished the battle, indeed the Portuguese democrats of 1822
openly appealed to the example of Revolutionary France. Most liberals,
whether from conviction or from fear of condemning liberalism to a
minority programme, strove to avoid open battle by historical disguises:
the attack on the Inquisition in the Cortes of Cadiz was presented as a
revival of Yisigothic Law when it was the minimal liberal demand for a
free press. It is on such issues that we see the liberals diverging from the
eighteenth-century civil servants: liberals realised the programme of
regalians but they fought, not in the cause of the rights of the crown,
but for a liberal society.
To the reformers it was the practice of bourgeois virtue that would
enrich the country and enlarge the revenues of the state. The Spanish
bourgeoisie was only gradually fitting itself for this mission: the pro-
fessional classes, except for the higher ranges of the civil service, were
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miserably paid and held in low esteem — the prestige of lawyers was
entirely a nineteenth-century phenomenon. The commercial classes
were often conservative; the typical Castilian town remained the centre
of a local market, an administrative capital in economic decline. It
was on the periphery of Spain that an economic revival was beginning,
stimulated by a population-rise, small on European standards but
remarkable given the demographic stagnation of Spain, by the opening
of the American markets to the whole of Spain (1768) and by a gap
between wages and prices which favoured investment and expansion.
The fact that this revival was most marked in Valencia, the Basque
Provinces and Catalonia created a new balance of force that was to have
profound political effects in the nineteenth century. 1 Catalonia was
the centre of a real industrial revolution, based on cotton; by 1805 the
industry employed 10,000 workers. Catalan cork and brandy boomed.
Catalans spread a new commercial outlook into Spain. In Portugal
Pombal and his successors were faced by the loss of Brazilian prosperity
of which the great palace of Mafra is the symbol. His methods were the
old fashioned recipes of commercial monopolies and royal factories.
Much Portuguese trade remained in foreign hands, although there are
unmistakable signs of a native revival. By the 1820’s the Lisbon mer-
chants sought to force on the liberal Constituent Assembly their plan for
the future of a truly national economy. 2
Thus in neither country could liberalism draw its strength from a
strong industrial and merchant class, but the absence of such a class
has been made to explain too readily the weaknesses of Iberian liberal-
ism. The Spanish middle class was numerous and strong, but it differed
in composition from that of other countries in western Europe. It
included the middling urban land-owners who were to be the benefici-
aries of liberal land-legislation — the expropriation of civil and ecclesi-
astical entail and the municipal commons — and to give liberalism its
electoral machinery in the local influence of the cacique. Above all it
included the officer corps who were to give it its peculiar strength.
Agriculture remained the fundamental pursuit of the Iberian peoples.
Its diversity precludes any generalisation. Broadly speaking, areas of
peasant proprietorship were Catholic and conservative: Carlism and
Miguelism were rooted in the Basque provinces and in northern
Portugal: in 1822 the Portuguese reactionaries sought to mobilise the
north against the liberal south. This agricultural system, if it failed to
respond to the gospel of improvement propagated by the Patriotic
Societies, was neither as stable nor as technically backward as has been
1 P. Vilar, ‘Dans Barcelone au XVIIIe si£cle’, in Estudios histdricos de los archivos de
Protocolos II (Barcelona, 1950).
* F. Piteira Santos, ‘A burguesia comercial de Lisboa,’ in Revista de Economia IV
(Lisbon, 1951), pp. 22-5
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imagined. Starved of capital, the traditional system could nevertheless
shift its emphasis between sheep, wheat and olives, or even produce new
crops like madder, in response to market conditions. Thus both
Portugal and Spain in the early nineteenth century showed a truly re-
markable increase in the production of the basic food crop — wheat. 1
Again, movement and increased production, resulting from drainage
and irrigation, were most noticeable in the Mediterranean periphery.
The agrarian problem of Spain lay in the wretched conditions of the
landless labourers on the latifundia of the south and west and in the
grinding poverty of the smaller peasants and tenant farmers of the centre.
In the year 1760 the government displayed interest in agrarian reform
which would marry surplus labour to surplus land. One school of
reformers advocated state-supported peasant holdings and rent re-
striction. Liberals rejected this solution in favour of sale of the Chinch
lands and the municipal commons on the open market to be improved
by new owners — the solution so powerfully advocated in Jovellanos’
Informe. This policy of free sale inevitably benefited the economically
powerful, and those who advocated it were certainly ignorant of the
social consequences of free trade in land on the marginal peasant.
For the feebleness of Spanish and Portuguese foreign policy 1789-
1808, the blame has been laid on the return in Portugal to the system
of court piety, and in Spain on the rule of the queen’s favourite, Godoy.
In fact both countries were second-rate powers unable to relieve, by
neutrality, the intolerable stresses imposed by the French wars on their
traditional structure of alliances. The war of 1793-5 made evident
Spam’s weakness. Godoy had no alternative but to revert to the
French alliance, seeking in it a security against his enemies at court and
the prospect of a principality in Portugal should his enemies triumph
on the death of Charles IV. His attempt to reverse his system, when
Napoleon no longer underwrote his position and when French troops
were pouring into Spain, came too late and precipitated his fall. Godoy,
an inexperienced Guards officer in his twenties, was a patron of litera-
ture, mildly progressive in educational matters and a radical reformer in
his attack on Church lands (a policy which made the Church look with
favour on a constitution which limited the monarchy). His cardinal
weakness was his subordination of policy to the shifting world of court
favour; the scandalous origin of his power and his use of patronage
created enemies. His fall was engineered by the partisans of the heir
apparent, Ferdinand, in alliance with the hatred of a court aristocracy
for a favourite who was a minor provincial noble. Ferdinand’s agents
organised the riot of Aranjuez (March 1808) which forced the panic-
stricken Charles IV to abdicate. The crown had surrendered to the
1 A. Moreau de Jonnes, Statistique de VEspagne (Paris, 1834), pp. 106-9. A. Gilbert,
Revista de Economia VI (Lisbon, 1953), pp. 65-80.
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mob. The plot had entailed a consistent attempt by the heir apparent to
discredit his mother’s name and his father’s minister, in alliance with a
vague aristocratic constitutionalism and perhaps, though the evidence
is scanty, with a nation-wide ‘liberal’ conspiracy against the ‘Caliph’
Godoy. 1 Above all, Ferdinand VII was counting on the French alliance
at the very moment when Godoy, at last, saw its dangers, particularly to
the Spanish Empire in America. The prince’s party had been angling
for French support since 1806, and Ferdinand hoped to rule as the
recognised protege of France. Thus Ferdinand was the first Afrancesado
and it was only his rejection by Napoleon at Bayonne which turned him
into a symbol of the national resistance to France.
In this resistance, as significant in the creation of Spanish nationalism
as the war of liberation was in Germany, official Spain hesitated, un-
certain of success against French troops and fearful of the conse-
quences of revolutionary action against a government to which
Ferdinand had legally transferred his sovereignty. To contest the rights
of Joseph Bonaparte entailed appeal to doctrines that sovereignty did
not lie in the crown but in the nation. The Council of Castile and the
Junta, left by Ferdinand in Madrid, had no other instructions but to
conciliate the French; unable to contemplate resistance to a capital
garrisoned by French troops, their sole concern was the maintenance of
order and the avoidance of any formal, legal rejection of Ferdinand’s
rights. 2 In Catalonia the authorities co-operated with the French
generals: the French could only be resisted by an appeal to what a
French officer called Timmense canaille de Barcelone’. How could the
seventy-year-old captain general, Ezpeleta, be expected to make such an
appeal? Official co-operation in the initial stages of occupation misled
the French.
Resistance was forced on the constituted authorities from below;
if the time-honoured phrase ‘the people arose’ conceals the activities
of the organisers of the revolution, it rightly consecrates its popular
nature. The Madrid rising on 2 May 1 808 was the outcome of xenophobia
exacerbated by friction with occupying troops. In the middle of May the
movement swept over the provinces: murder and popular pressure
forced captains-general and local authorities to arm the people and to
accept self-constituted local Juntas. The movement was not solely
directed against French butchery in Madrid : it was the last convulsive
struggle against Godoy, who was protected by the French. The Juntas
that were set up all over Spain represented the acceptance of the
revolution by the local notables. Embarrassed by their revolutionary
1 C. Corona, Revolution y reaction en el Reinado de Carlos IV (Madrid, 1957 ). PP- 3 1 2-88.
1 Cp. Azanza y O’Farril, Memoria Justificativa ( Biblioteca de Autores Espanoles,
XCVII, Madrid, 1957), vol. 1, p. 288. D. du Dezert, Revue Hispanique, XVII (Paris, 1907),
pp. 66-378. J. R. Mercader, Barcelona durante la ocupacidn Francesa (Madrid, 1949).
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origins which brought constant conflict with officials of the old regime,
often guilty of selfish provincialism, sometimes reduced to mere
shadow authorities without even ink and paper, slack in taxing and
conscripting their own districts, they included enough responsible
patriots to push through the formation of the Central Junta, a clumsy
body of delegates forming the government of Spain. Its position as a
sovereign body, legitimate representative of a nation which had re-
assumed its constituent powers, was contested by the claim of the
Council of Castile that the old legality still obtained, while local Juntas
accused it of conservatism. By 18 1 x the Juntas had been brought by a
series of provincial Brumaires under the control of generals. Generals
had no time for civilians and found in their ineptitude and failure to
supply the armies a convenient explanation of a series of military
disasters. 1 Romana ejected the Asturian Junta with fifty grenadiers;
generals, in alliance with conservatives, intrigued against the central
authorities in Cadiz. These primitive pronunciamientos were evil
portents for the fate of liberal civilian government.
The calling of the Cortes legitimised the sovereignty of the people
which could alone provide a political theory to invalidate the legal
claims of Joseph. The conservative view that the old laws were still in
force could not accommodate the facts of the revolution of 1808;
the failure of the institutions of the old regime, from the king down,
destroyed the old ‘constitution’ of the monarchy, and popular resistance
had restored to the nation the rights it had transferred to the king.
Neither the notion of popular sovereignty itself, nor the general desire for
reform, need have resulted in the Constitution of 1812 with its extreme
limitation of executive power. The king was locked up ‘like a con-
stitutional wild beast’ ; thus the fate of liberalism in the early nineteenth
century was attached to a sacrosanct, unalterable constitution which
made effective parliamentary government impossible and which no king
could accept. The liberals attempted to conceal the rigid deduction
from the principles of popular sovereignty by presenting their handi-
work as the revival of the traditional constitution obscured by Habsburg
despotism, a sophism exposed when Argiielles admitted that an
‘inherited’ constitution which no longer ‘embodied the first principles
of national felicity’ could not limit the constituent rights of the nation.
While the political theory of the Cadiz liberals would have been
anathema to the government reformers of the eighteenth century,
much of the liberal programme was their legacy, invigorated and
widened by the imported vision of a society based on class, property
and freedom of contract, a vision that went beyond the administrative
and financial convenience of the crown. The federal structure of
1 For the discontents and ambitions of the Aragon command see the Memorias of the
Marques de Ayerbe ( Biblioteca de Autores Espanoles, xcvu, pp. 258-66).
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revolutionary Spain has concealed the ideal — a unified, uniform nation
of citizens equal before the law — which inspired the Cadiz legislators:
no guilds, no enclaves of local jurisdiction, no remnants of an estates
society in the form of seignorial jurisdictions, were to stand in the way of
the liberal nation state of equal laws and proportional taxation. In
their economic legislation the liberals were concerned, not with a socially
desirable redistribution of the land, but with the establishment of clear
and absolute property rights as against the confused notions of the old
system: hence the freedom to enclose against the grazing rights of the
Mesta: hence the abolition of sefiorios, a measure intended to establish
property rights on an acceptable contractual basis, not to relieve an
overburdened peasantry: hence the transfer of municipal commons to
individual ownership and the absence of an agrarian reform which
would imply an interference with property rights. Thus was sketched
out, though the war prevented its implementation, the programme of
nineteenth-century liberation.
Against their political interests the liberals were drawn into an attack
on the Church, which, if aided by the arguments of regalianism, went
far beyond it. In the attack on the Inquisition, the debate between a
progressive and a traditional Spain took its modern form. The abolition
of clerical jurisdictions, the proposed attack on mortmain as a means of
paying the national debt, above all the acceptance of Joseph’s sup-
pression of the monasteries, produced a division between conservatives
and liberals, and committed the Regular Orders to a counter-crusade
against liberalism. Thus it was the threatened Church which led the
reaction the nobility were too weak to organise; the electioneering
activities of the priests helped to produce the more conservative ordinary
Cortes of 1813-14. 1
How are we to estimate Spain’s military contribution to her own
delivery? The regular army went from defeat to defeat. After 1809
Spanish resistance centred in the guerrillas. Numbering, probably,
about thirty thousand, their partisan tactics could produce no splendid
feat of arms. They did produce a powerful myth, inherited by both
Carlists and the extremist Left. Guerrilla resistance became an element
in the patriot creed, in the rhetorical nationalism evident in 1822: it
romanticised revolution, the spontaneous rising of the locality against
a corrupt central government. The most confusing legacy of the war to
liberalism was the problem of the collaborators, the Afrancesados.
Many, in both Spain and Portugal, served the French from lazy self-
interest and love of office, or were political adventurers like Casanova,
who made a fortune out of running the police in Barcelona. The genuine
Afrancesados were those who served France from conviction. Their
central position was that the independence of Spain as a separate king-
1 M. Artola, Los origines de la EspaOa contempordnea (Madrid, 1959), pp. 610-15.
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dom could best be preserved by the Josephine monarchy; that patriot
resistance must bring military conquest that would end political inde-
pendence. Moreover, since Ferdinand’s abdication gave no legal
grounds for resistance, patriotism implied an appeal to ‘republican’
doctrines which the crown itself could not accept. Popular committees,
radical Cortes, ragged and revolutionary armies represented anarchy.
The tragedy of the Afrancesados was that they backed the wrong horse,
and that Napoleon’s military demands for the Ebro provinces and his
indifference to his brother’s policy of gaining hearts destroyed their
raison d'etre. But they were not low traitors and collaborationists:
they were often the progressive elements in Spanish society, liberal-
minded civil servants who saw in Joseph’s monarchy the hope of a
reformed Spain.
In Portugal the liberal revolt of 1808 had come to nothing; in Spain
the liberal experiment ended with Ferdinand VII’s return in 1814.
Ferdinand’s hesitations about overthrowing the constitution ended
once he was assured of military backing and when the right-wing
‘Deputation of the Persians’ revealed the strength of the anti- Jacobin
feeling in the Cortes, now in Madrid. Recently much has been made of
the Persian programme of a traditional monarchy, affording a via
media between doctrinal liberalism and eighteenth-century ministerial
despotism, both considered foreign importations. 1 Anachronistic,
institutionally imprecise and unworkable, the Persian programme was
to serve only as an excuse to overthrow liberalism and all its enactments
(4 May 1814) and to return to ministerial despotism, the only system
that the Bourbon and Braganza monarchs understood and could work.
Popular royalism was a pretext for Don Carlos ; only Dom Miguel, later,
understood it as a demagogic and peasant movement. Reaction in
Portugal and Spain was inefficient, insecure and arbitrary, constantly
threatened by army revolt, secret societies and the hostility of exiled
liberals. Tentative moves towards a more moderate administration
(inspired by Ferdinand’s need of the financial competence of men like
Garay and Ballesteros who had liberal connections), were met by revolt
and reaction towards the old system. At their best, liberal demands
reflect the poet Quintana’s proposition that no one who has lived in a
free society can imagine an unfree society; at their worst they prove
that political life was a battle for a limited supply of patronage; the
liberal pretendientes could only make a take-over bid for a patronage
system too small to be shared out. This situation was a presupposition
of military liberalism.
Ferdinand’s regime and the Regency in Portugal could only be saved
by solvency and prosperity; this meant the recovery of the American
empire and the restoration of the eighteenth-century trade relationship
1 E.g. F. Suarez Verdeguer, La Crisis politico del antiguo regimen, 1800-40 (Madrid, 1950).
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with Brazil, both beyond the resources of what were called ‘les cours
secondaires’. Spain refused concession or British mediation, ‘as un-
bending as if Europe was at its feet’; English diplomacy showed little
tact in handling the susceptibilities of declining imperialism, and her
trade interests in South America poisoned relations with Spain. The
last gamble was the attempt to go it alone, that refusal to concede to the
inevitable which transfuses Spanish policy with a kind of mad glory.
Femandine Spain could not produce the army to stave off American
defeat: the Andalusian expeditionary force defeated, not American
rebels, but the monarchy itself. The Regency in Portugal and Ferdinand
VII both took enormous risks in alienating sections of army opinion.
In Portugal this was the result of Beresford’s rule and English monopoly
of high rank. In Spain enforced economy and fear of residual liberal
sentiment led the government to pension off with minor posts the new
officer caste flung up in the war. These officers, to their opponents up-
starts deluded by rapid war promotions into dreams of a Spanish
Brumaire, revolted. Compared to later generations of generals, who
regarded revolution as a business enterprise, they were noble idealists
who deserved their place in liberal martyrology.
The instruments of liberal revolution in Spain and Portugal were the
secret societies (whose successful activities from 1815 to 1820 account
for the obsessive concern of Iberian clericals with freemasonry) and the
pronunciamiento, an officers’ revolt based on the crude political theory
that the general will of the nation, when vitiated by a monarch’s evil
counsellors or corrupt parliamentary institutions, was to be sought in
the officer corps. The pronunciamiento was to develop a rigid form,
with a consistent weakness : fear of discovery of elaborate negotiations
meant that most pronunciamientos went off at half cock. This was
balanced by the inefficiency of government detection and detention:
Quiroga, the chosen leader in 1820, was allowed complete freedom to
conspire from prison. A ramshackle despotism encouraged revolu-
tionary irresponsibility. 1 The early pronunciamientos in Spain and
Portugal merely produced martyrs, Gomes Freire d’Andrade in
Portugal and Lacy, the symbol of Catalan liberalism. Civilian support
was limited though increasing, and the rank and file were indifferent to
their officers’ liberalism. If there was a vast masonic, civil conspiracy
in 1817, it came to nothing. Why did the Cadiz revolution of 1820
succeed, led, as it was, by young officers and inexperienced civil hot-
heads after the higher officers and the notables of Cadiz masonry had
been frightened by O’Donnell’s betrayal of the ‘respectable’ conspiracy
of 1819? What gave the revolution its strength was ‘the repugnance of
the rank and file against embarking for America’, which, for the first
1 J. L. Cornelias, Los primeros pronunciamientos en Espaha (Madrid, 1958). R. Carr, in
Soldiers and Governments, ed. M. Howard (1957), pp. 135-48.
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time, gave sergeants and soldiers a direct interest in revolution. The
British consul believed that revolt ‘would die a natural death’; it tri-
umphed through the feebleness of a government which could not collect
a force to fight it. 1 In March the revolution spread to the great towns of
Saragossa, Coruna and Barcelona. General Ballesteros and O’Donnell
deserted to the revolution; the king was forced to accept the constitution
of 1812 (which Riego had adopted on the spur of the moment), not
by the force of public opinion expressed in demonstrations in Madrid
but because he had lost control of the army.
The revolution of 1820-3 set the programme and procedures of
Iberian liberalism and that of its enemies. In Spain, 1812 had been a
dress rehearsal in exceptional circumstances; in Portugal, the revolu-
tion of 1808 had failed to materialise. The new party groupings of the
1820 revolution were permanent. Liberalism both in Spain and Portugal
was divided into moderate and exalted wings.
The strength of the Exaltados lay in the provincial extremism of the
Juntas, which ruled Spain until June-July, and in the revolutionary army
of Riego. Thus emerged the mechanism of revolution: on its military
side the army coup ; on its civilian side, the take-over by local Juntas
whose extreme claims, particularly in Galicia and the south, con-
stituted a federal structure where sovereign Juntas, controlling the
new Urban Militia, communicated directly with each other. Though
these enthusiasts had made the revolution, they did not share the
definitive distribution of higher patronage. The government, com-
posed of men of 1812, regarded the new revolutionaries as ‘poor folk’.
In the capital the Exaltados could produce mob pressure which may
be seen less as the emergence of an underworld terror depicted by
Galdos than as the ebullience of the fiesta. From the ministry’s en-
deavour to regain control of the army and from the use of the Madrid
mob by the Exaltados in defence of Riego’s army dates the split in
patriot unity that was to paralyse the revolution (September 1821).
The Exaltados were weak in a capital of satisfied job-seekers: the
government impotent in the provinces. This dualism was to define
revolutionary politics until 1874.
The exiles of the ministry of ‘gaol birds’ (March 1820) sought to
control the committee stage of the revolution, enshrined in the Juntas
and the clubs, and to satisfy the king by a conservative revision of the
constitution of 1812. In exile, men like Martinez de la Rosa had been
converted to a belief in a limited franchise, a second chamber and a
strong executive. The amnestied Afrancesados, the ablest single group
in politics, would have been their natural allies but for the doubtfully
patriotic past which cut them off from office, leaving them the pro-
fessional critics of the regime. The moderate programme could only
1 P.R.O., F.O. 73 (Spain). Wellesley’s dispatches: January-March 1S20.
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succeed with the loyal support of the king: instead the court plotted
against any constitution to the point of allying itself with the Exaltados.
The great weakness of the revolution was that the constitution could not
do without a king whose sole aim was to destroy it.
The king’s hostility flung ministers into alliance with the ‘victims of
September’; this alliance with the Exaltados was temporary, and in the
su mm er of 1821 a more moderate ministry was confronted by a renewal
in the provinces of radical revolution: whole areas of Spain were
withdrawn from the control of the central government. Urban radical-
ism was fed by unemployment and continued taxation, the abolition of
which was ‘ the thermometer of liberty ’. In Cadiz, extremists threatened
a Hanse Republic, in Coruna Exaltados announced their ‘refusal to
obey the orders of a detested ministry’. The government controlled the
capital; defeating Riego’s supporters in the comic opera battle of the
Platerias (September 1821) it won over the ‘plain’ in the Cortes. The
new ministry of Martinez de la Rosa now had strong foreign backing
for constitutional revision. These hopes crashed with the treason of the
king, who consistently failed to comprehend the possibilities for a
recovery of royal power in a revised constitution backed by moderate
liberals. 1 His inept intrigues produced the journees of July 1822, water-
shed of the revolution. The militia and the artillery rallied against the
revolt of the Guards Regiments, some of whose officers were right-wing
constitutionalists, others absolutists. Not only did the king break with
the revolution — radicals now talked of a regency — but he failed his
royalist allies. Their ‘rage at the behaviour of the king’ was the
origin of Carlism. With palace counter-revolution discredited, the hopes
of royalism lay in the countryside.
The royalist reaction was a renewal of the guerrilla tradition by the
extreme right: small bands put isolated areas under contribution, and a
regency in the name of the captive king was set up at Seo de Urgel
(August 1822). Recent historians have exaggerated the strength of this
native royalism; 2 Seo was captured, and the ‘modern Caligula’, Mina,
crushed royalism in Catalonia. Once Baron Eroles, the only important
soldier on the royalist side, had failed to subvert the liberal army,
counter-revolution could only succeed with French arms, a lesson borne
out by the subsequent history of Carlism. Most of the royalists were
prepared to accept French conditions: a moderate royalist constitution.
With victory the ‘pure’ royalist could forget these pledges. The
government, now in the hands of the patriots of the 1820 lodges, after
deposing the king, did nothing to resist the advance of Angouleme’s
troops and the revolution ended as it had begun, by the defection of the
army. The generals tried to negotiate a settlement, which would save
1 P.R.O., F.O. 73 (Spain). Hervey’s report, io March 1822.
* E.g. J. L. Cornelias, Los realistas en el trienio constitucional (Pamplona, 1958).
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their ‘jobs and honours and enable them to come out on top in one
system as in another’. 1 Civilians hoped to survive by the sacrifice of
the sacred codex. This was of no avail. The king rejected Angouleme’s
conciliatory advice, and Villele, prophesying civil war, abandoned
French hopes of a constitutional settlement. The first civil war ended
with proscriptions, committees of purification and local reprisals,
modified only by the presence of French occupying troops.
The revolution had been defeated by foreign arms, but by 1823 it
had become the dictatorship of a deeply unpopular clique : the moderates
and Afrancesados had withdrawn from politics in July 1822. A revolu-
tion, whose social content was the 1812 programme of abolishing entails,
selling the commons and church property, had few attractions for the
lower classes, apart from the excitement of revolutionary anarchy.
Moreover, the revolution had come into conflict with the Church. In
early days, the patriots emphasised the constitutional establish m ent of
Catholicism as the sole religion, and the hierarchy preached acceptance;
its neutrality weakened as the government failed to control press attacks
on the familiar eighteenth-century lines and developed its attack on the
property of the Regular Orders. In its fin al agonies the revolution
turned persecutor. In 1823 the Spanish Church could count its
martyrs. 2
In the spring of 1820, de Lesseps, French consul in Lisbon, was
convinced that the Spanish example would set off a revolution in
Portugal; but specific discontents (an absentee king, the dominance of
the English faction) gave the Portuguese revolution its own brand of
patriotism, imitating the France of the Great Revolution as much as
the Spain of Riego. 3 The expected ‘gentle revolution’ (de Lesseps)
came with the revolt of the Oporto garrison and the lower officers in
Lisbon: the government had neither moral nor physical force with
which to combat the radical euphoria of 1820. As in Spain, the revolu-
tion divided against itself and hopes of a moderate constitutional settle-
ment foundered: to the democrats the efforts of moderates to draw up a
constitution acceptable to the king and the country at large were
regarded as evidence of reactionary designs. The king possessed
‘passions that must necessarily turn him into a despot’ and was treated
accordingly. John VI disliked the constitution but he was unwilling to
support an absolutist reaction, captained by his queen and his second
son, Dom Miguel, drawing its force from demagogic appeal. His final
solution, never applied, was the aristocratic constitutionalism, associated
with Palmella, embodied in a constitution octroyee. The revolution in
1 M. J. Quintana, Biblioteca de Autores Espanoles, vol. xix (Madrid, 1946), p. 581.
a J. Carrera Pujal, Historia politico de Cataluna en el siglo XIX (Barcelona, 1957),
vol. n, pp. 1 15 ff.
3 Archives du Ministere des Affaires fitrangeres, Paris. Correspondance Politique,
Portugal, de Lesseps’ reports.
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Portugal left a chastened radical tradition and the hostility of those
classes threatened by revolutionary legislation: the Church, the civil
service and the local nobility. Against these classes Saldanha saw that
the Charter which Pedro, John Vi’s elder son, granted in 1826 must
be imposed by force. As in Spain, the issue would not be fought out by
two or more parties within a constitution: it concerned the existence of a
constitution as such, which absolutists could not accept. Such conflicts
can only be resolved in war.
The ‘ominous decade’ in Spain (1823-33) was not a period of un-
relieved reaction : a debased version of ministerial despotism, associated
with Calomarde, confronted popular ‘pure’ royalism which had emerged
in 1823 and the persistence of a moderate reformist group. Ferdinand
VII alone could arbitrate between the court factions and stave off civil
war; it was this that sustained his popularity and gave the ailing despot
what Miraflores calls ‘moral force’. To the monarchy, the attraction
of popular royalism lay in its hostility to the revolution and all its
works: its danger lay in its determination to impose its terms on the
monarchy, if necessary by rebellion. These terms, set out by the
Catalan rebels of 1827, were the essential programme of Carlism, with-
out the foral issue; the dissolution of the liberal army and civil service,
the abolition of police and education, the restoration of the Inquisi-
tion, a patriarchal monarchy stripped of modern inventions. 1 Their
strength lay in the Church and the Royalist Volunteers. We know little
of this militia of reaction. To Addington, a supporter of Don Carlos’s
claims, it was an ‘odious rabble’ which could only prejudice his
chances by driving the regular army to support Isabella. 2 Uncontrolled
by either the War Office or the Treasury, its persecutions created the
black legend of these years. The volunteers represented mass royalism,
‘a royalist democracy,’ wrote Balmes, ‘a true citizen army, in its way
an emblem of popular sovereignty.’ This force lies at the origins of
militant Carlism. Fortunately for the liberal cause it had been dissolved
before the Carlist War began.
After the 1827 revolt Ferdinand VII set out to capture the support of
‘intelligence’, a policy which was strengthened by the new queen,
Maria Christina, whose child would have to contend against court
Carlism. One of the strands of Cristino liberalism was the group of
civil servants and court aristocrats which this policy brought to the fore.
To a bankrupt crown they held out promise of breaking the bankers’
strike by which the London and Paris money market penalised
Ferdinand’s repudiation of the liberal loans of 1820-3. Characteristic
1 A Pirala, Historia de laguerra civil (Madrid, 1 889), vol. 1, p. 57. The foral issue concerned
the rights of self government ( fueros ) possessed by the Basques, and by extension the term
was used to describe the privileges of Catalonia.
8 P.R.O., F.O. 73 (Spain). Addington, 17 November 1832.
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of the aristocrats was Miraflores; of the civil servants, Ballesteros and
Xavier de Burgos. Ballesteros (Finance Minister, 1823-33), a minor
Galician nobleman, was a treasury technician who forced through
modem accounting methods and was considered a liberal through his
patronage of the notables of the Afrancesado party. No doubt his
liberalism has been exaggerated: it is nevertheless a remarkable com-
mentary on the ominous decade that he could cling to office throughout
it. Burgos represents in its purest form the provenance of one brand
of moderate reform. He was an Afrancesado with an enduring admira-
tion for the eighteenth-century reformers and French administrative
techniques. He argued that the ‘ bankers’ league ’ would only grant
credit if a change of system and an amnesty prevented the exiles from
‘poisoning the springs of credit’. Like most Afrancesados who had
wanted a moderate constitution in 1820 he now believed administrative
reform under an enlightened crown would satisfy liberal aspirations : a
modern Ministry of the Interior, replacing the old cumbrous Council of
Castile, could by a mere fiat ‘bring the Lower Ebro to prosperity’.
The whole of these later years is marked by the presence of penitent
Afrancesados who hoped to work their passage as servants of a reform-
ing monarchy. Lista, the poet, worked as a propagandist for ‘strong
legitimate government’ which would build roads, free industry and
patronise the useful arts. 1
To liberal exiles, suffering in Somerstown and Paris, the Iberian issue
was re-opened by the death of John VI of Portugal (1826), the struggle
between Don Carlos and the queen’s party at court and the French
Revolution of July 1830. Liberalism and reaction, as in 1820, became
Iberian phenomena. The Portuguese succession dominated Spanish
politics, and over against the reactionary concord of Dom Miguel and
Don Carlos stood the radical vision of Iberian union. Saldanha, the
Portuguese liberal, was ready to join a descent on Andalusia, Mina to
help Portuguese patriots. These attempts served only to reveal the petty
division of exiles and to turn Ferdinand away from the queen’s party
and the advocates of moderation.
Dom Pedro, Emperor of Brazil, hoped to solve the Portuguese suc-
cession by the marriage of his daughter, the future Maria II, with Dom
Miguel on condition that the latter would accept the Constitutional
Charter of 1826. This settlement collapsed when Dom Miguel was
declared absolute king. While Palmella sought compromise solutions
with the help of foreign intervention, Saldanha saw that only force
would make the conservative Portuguese accept a constitution, the work
of an emperor who had ‘ stolen ’ Brazil. Only the liberalism of the Minho
province provided the basis for a liberal revolution. This collapsed in
1828, unleashing a terror in Lisbon, a terror which alienated European
1 H. Juretschke, Vida , obra y pensamiento de Alberto Lista (Madrid, 1951).
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sympathy, weakening the originally strong international position of the
Miguelite cause.
Dom Pedro’s hesitations, the despair of the liberal Left, were ended
by the loss of his Brazilian throne ; he now saw himself as the chivalrous,
disinterested champion of his daughter’s rights, the leader who would
unify Portuguese liberalism. A contradictory character, he was capable
of heroic decision. With a mercenary army financed by a loan floated
by the Spanish liberal Mendizabal, he endured the siege of Oporto,
captured Lisbon after Napier’s astonishing naval victory and, with the
help of a Spanish corps, forced Dom Miguel to renounce his claims by
the Treaty of Evora Montes (May 1834).
Although this victory was never reversed, liberal Portugal was
always insolvent, always unstable. As in Spain, liberals could fight
together only to save the succession. Party divisions were personalised.
Palmella, the diplomat without faith in the liberal revolution, originally
favoured an aristocratic constitution on the English model, imposed if
need be by foreign influence. His rival Saldanha, theatrical but a brave
soldier loved by his troops, whose dogma was the Charter and nothing
but the Charter, was ready to ally with radicals (Passos Manuel with his
‘throne of Maria II and the principles of ’91’). The minority nature of
Portuguese liberalism, the appearance of rhetorical parliamentarianism
covering a spoils system, has no doubt been exaggerated. Nevertheless
Miguelism was the popular creed, and Dom Miguel was loved as a
Dom Sebastian whose reappearance was announced by choirs of angels
in the Lisbon sky. He appealed to rural Portugal, to the Lisbon mob,
to that ‘fanatic, violent, apathetic, intriguing low and weak’ Portugal
of the Jesuits so bitterly described by Oliveira Martins. The philosophy
of exile, the notion of a people groaning under tyranny and welcoming
its deliverers, evaporated in the moral isolation of the liberal army.
‘Do not make me use force in order to liberate you’ (Dom Pedro’s
Proclamation on landing, August 1832). But it was only force that could
impose liberalism. Mousinho, a Benthamite anti-Jacobin, sought to
create by decree a liberal society that would sustain liberal institutions.
Not constitutions, in his view, but developing wealth, commerce freed
from antique restriction, land freed from the burden of tithes, would
make liberalism viable. Domestic prosperity could not thus be created ;
Portugal, once the wealth of Brazil was gone, could not escape an acute
deficit in its balance of payments. Liberalism was thus condemned to an
insoluble debt problem, a dependence on foreign loans negotiated at
disastrous rates, and to the hostility of those attacked in principles and
pockets.
In Spain, a decisive choice was forced on the crown by the crystallisa-
tion of political forces at court brought about by the ‘Events of La
Granja’ (September 1832). Maria Christina had succeeded in getting
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public recognition of her daughter’s claims by the publication of the
Pragmatic Sanction. This exclusion of Don Carlos was of doubtful
legal validity; his supporters at court, during the illness of the king,
forced the revocation of the Sanction when the queen was isolated from
the ministry at the summer palace of La Granja. 1 The queen, rallying
round her the moderate liberals of the capital and thus creating the
nucleus of a Cristino party, re-established the Sanction, replacing the
existing ministers by a semi-liberal ministry under the diplomat Cea
Bermudez. Carlism could no longer count on a court revolution in its
favour; its only chance lay in the revolt which the pretender’s legalism
had eschewed and open appeal to the deep rooted loyalties to church and
king, the particularism of the northern provinces and the hatred of the
country for the town.
The first step in the alliance with liberalism was very cautious. Cea
represented old-fashioned, administrative reform, but his ministry
strengthened liberal forces: the Royalist Volunteers were dissolved,
captains-general purged provincial administration (the spoils system
preceded the machinery of parliamentary democracy), a limi ted amnesty
was granted, the universities opened and the liberal panacea for
prosperity, a Ministry of the Interior, was set up. Cea nevertheless
obstinately supported Dom Miguel and set his face against the con-
stitutionalism implicit in the recognition of Isabella’s claim by a Cortes.
Administrative reform was enough; any form of constitution would
merely provoke Carlism.
The death of the king (September 1833) and the outbreak of the
Carlist revolt made Cea’s restricted programme impossible. On the
day after the king died, Miraflores recommended strengthening the
Cristino cause by summoning the Cortes on a narrow property basis
and conceding a complete amnesty. Opposition to Cea spread from a
court circle gathered in the Regency Council to a liberal opinion, vocal
for the first time since 1823. Xavier de Burgos and others who had been
opposed to any structural reform saw that the war demanded the sup-
port of what Addington called ‘the moderate men of the country’ at
the price of some sort of Cortes. This was a decisive step. The crown
allied with parliamentary liberalism in its most conservative form. This
contract the crown could never break nor could the immediate bene-
ficiaries maintain the permanent exclusion of the heirs of the radicals of
1820. Unable to move Cea, in October the opponents of the minister
called in the generals. Llauder had been building up his army in
Catalonia and had commanded the support of the Barcelona bourgeoisie,
for the first time a factor in politics, in his struggle with the Royalist
Volunteers. When he and General Quesada demanded Cea’s dismissal
1 The details of the liberal version of these events have been recently criticised by F.
Suarez, Los sucesos de la Granja (Madrid, 1953), but their political import remains the same.
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and a Cortes based on ‘ancient legislation of the Kingdom’, the full
mechanism of the politics of conservative liberalism stood revealed.
Unable to achieve political ends by civilian means, a party appealed to
the arbitration of the army.
Cea’s fall brought into power a liberal ministry under Martinez de la
Rosa which made minimal concessions to liberalism in the Royal
Statute of 1834 — a conservative constitution octroy ee suitably dressed
up as the historic constitution of Spain. The opposition refused to
accept the statute and sought to force parliamentary control of the
ministry, bitterly attacked for its conduct of the war in the north, where
the genius of Zumalcarregui defeated every general sent against him.
When French aid was refused, the government had not the force to deal
with the creeping anarchy of the south. The progressives were carried
to power, not by parliamentary victory, but by provincial revolution,
which swept over Catalonia and the south in the summer of 1835.
Spain was effectively ruled by Juntas, varying from town to town and
whose programme included a change in the ministry, the constitution of
1812, the creation of jobs for patriots and the abolition of taxes, the
dissolution of the monasteries and a free press. On Villiers’ advice the
queen mother bowed before the storm and called on Mendizabal to
form a government.
It was Mendizabal who, now and after the revolution of August 1836,
put into effect the programme which the revolution of 1820 had in-
herited from the Cortes of Cadiz: financial necessity forced a decisive
attack on Church lands although the debates reveal undercurrents of
anti-clericalism characteristic of left-wing liberalism: 1 the law of 1820
abolishing civil entail was confirmed. Throughout the nineteenth
century the ‘liberation’ of the land to the fructifying influence of capital
was regarded as the historic achievement of liberalism. A series of Acts
from 1813 to 1855 conveyed the cultivable parts of the national and
municipal commons to private ownership, and by 1844 over half the
Church lands had been sold, largely to holders of government bonds,
while entailed land of at least an equal value passed, probably from the
lower reaches of the nobility, to new owners. This large transfer of
land increased agricultural productivity, as reformers had claimed, but
it did not solve the social aspects of the agrarian problem. Although
liberal legislation contained clauses intended to protect the small
cultivator, there can be little doubt that the sale of common lands
worsened the lot of the agrarian poor, while other sales strengthened the
hold of the larger landowners and, as has been recently established, the
position of the most prosperous peasants. 2
1 Diario de las Cortes , May 1837.
2 E.g. Jimenez de Gregorio, ‘La poblacion en la Jara Toledano’, in Estudios Geograficos
(1954), vol. xiv, p. 214.
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In the struggle against this new wave of radicalism emerged the two
groups — the conservative-liberal Moderates and the radical Progressives
— which were to share the spoils of political life. Their opposition
crystallised around their respective constitutional doctrines: the
historical ‘internal constitution’ of the joint sovereignty of the king and
Cortes embodied in the moderate Constitutions of 1834 and 1845, and
the sovereignty of the people of the Progressive Constitution of 1837.
The Moderates were a party of notables: distinguished ex-radicals,
now repentant; the bureaucratic aristocracy which had replaced the old
nobility as a political force; the well-to-do bourgeoisie of Catalonia,
alarmed at mob violence; the landowners of Biscay fearing the claims of
the merchants of San Sebastian. Spiritually akin to the French doctrin-
aires, their political theory justified their class claims to power: the
‘sovereignty of intelligence’ and the rejection of radical ‘abstract
metaphysics’ in favour of constitutional structures tailored to the
‘balance of forces in society’. Believers in strong government, they
supported and were supported by the crown. This alliance was to ruin
the crown and the Moderates alike by turning the crown into a Moderate
institution and the party into an exclusive oligarchy. Given the
permanent loan of the crown’s prerogatives of appointing ministers and
dissolving the Cortes, the Moderates could count on permanent power
provided they could control local government and elections. The defeat
of the Moderates’ local government law was thus a life and death matter
to the Progressives.
Against the ‘exclusiveness’ of the Moderates, the Progressives repre-
sented the claims of the urban radicalism that had inspired the exaltado
tradition. The denial of the support of the prerogatives of the crown
left the Progressives with no alternative but to force the closet by
revolution; they were so installed in 1835-6, 1840, 1854 and 1868. In
each case they were borne to office by a combination of provincial
revolution set off by economic hardship (the corn prices of 1836-7
were the highest of the century except for 1867) and by support, more or
less in each case, from the army. The provincial revolution was taken
over by local Progressive notables by the formation of a Junta and
sanctioned finally by a change of government in Madrid. This final
stage produced a breach between the Madrid leaders and the pro-
vincial activists which was the most serious weakness of the Progressive
party. The central tenet of Progressive constitutional doctrine — the
sovereignty of the people — was therefore an expression of their need of
a revolution, which to the Moderates threatened rule ‘by cobblers in
municipal office and bakers in the militia’. 1 There was, in Mina’s
phrase, a ‘legal right to revolt’ against a government which tampered
with a constitution, like that of 1837, made in a Constituent Cortes;
1 Cp. J. de Burgos, Amies del reinado de Isabel II (Madrid, 1850).
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this was the Progressives’ justification of revolution against the
Moderates’ attempt to reform the local government laws in 1840.
When the queen regent jettisoned Mendizabal the Progressive leaders
were saved by provincial extremists. Undermined by opposition agents,
the army could not resist a wave of Andalusian and Catalan urban
revolution. In Madrid the government held, but in August 1836 at
La Granja, a sergeants’ revolt forced the constitution of 1812 and a
radical ministry on the queen mother, accompanied by threats and
insults to her husband which were to alienate the queen mother from
Progressive politicians for the rest of her life : the ultimate consequence
was the revolution of 1868 by which her daughter lost her throne.
With the Moderates and the queen chastened, this crisis gave Carlism
its great political chance which the pretender’s advisers rejected. On the
other side, the Progressives’ Constitution of 1837, without the uni-
cameralism and hostility to the prerogatives of the crown which had
inspired the constitution of 1812, created the possibility of a liberal
union at the price of the rejection of the exaltado tradition by the
‘legal’ Progressives. The Moderates’ greatest political blunder was the
rejection of any compromise: they used the power of the crown in
order to modify the 1837 constitution by the restoration of crown control
over the municipalities. The liberal political system was exhausted;
the way lay open for the rule of generals, the significant development of
the later years of the Carlist war. In September 1840 the Progressives
were again restored to power by a slow-firing mixture of a provincial
revolution and a military coup. Whereas in 1836 the Progressives relied
on sergeants, in 1840 they could count on a general.
Generals became involved in politics when politicians could not
supply them with money to pay their troops and when the politicians
accused generals of keeping the pay in their own pockets, an accusation
which set off the mutinies in the summer of 1837. Only through a war
minister, sympathetic to the demands of a given corps, could its
commander maintain military efficiency. Rather than the product of a
military appetite for power, rule by generals was the result of the weak-
ness of the civil power and the party needs of the politicians. Politicians
hoped that soldiers’ victories would redound to their sponsor’s credit,
and each party wanted the prestige of ending the war. It was not merely
that the army was the home of liberalism, standing between it and
destruction by the Carlists: it was the only solid institution in the liberal
state. The political factions sensed their weakness after 1837, realising
that they could only impose their will on their opponents and the
country by appealing to the army. Espartero became the ‘sword’ of the
Progressives, Narvaez of the Moderates. Civilian demand thus pro-
duced the new race of soldier politicians who were to dominate Spanish
politics until Canovas restored civilian politics in 1875. The longevity
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of the system is explicable only if we realise that the distinction between
military and civil life was not as clear-cut as in the rest of Europe;
the officer corps was a part of the underpaid clerical class, with bureau-
cratic interests, rather than a military caste. Army bureaucrats could
look on military revolt as civilians might look on a change of ministers
— the supporters of the successful general were automatically promoted
a rank. Interference in politics became a habit, formalised in the rigid
routine of the pronunciamiento, from the initial soundings of barrack
opinion to the final flash of rhetoric, the grito. Civilian politicians,
though they might threaten to strangle generals in their own sashes,
could scarcely conceive of a political order without generals. Generals
never acted without civilian support in spite of their professed con-
tempt for corrupt politicians and courtiers. There is a great difference
between military dictatorship and this symbiotic system where military
revolution was accepted as part of the political machine, a legitimate way
to oust a governing group whose hold over the crown’s confidence and
the electoral machine made normal party alternation impossible.
The coincidence of military ambition and party politics is demon-
strated in the career of Espartero, the Duke of Victory who had forced
the Carlists to terms at Vergara (August 1839). He hid his ambition
behind the military political theory that it was the function of the army
and the officer corps to embody the general will of the nation; he
excused his hesitations by the difficulties of elucidating that will. Al-
though he told an English admirer in 1837 that the time had come to
‘over-rule an effete and corrupt form of Parliamentary Government’,
he hesitated before assuming the role of Cromwell. From 1838 to
1840 every ministry consulted his wishes while he appeared to be wait-
ing for the highest bidder. 1 Once he had decided to support the Pro-
gressives, the demonstrations of the radical mob of Barcelona forced the
queen regent to dismiss her feeble Moderate ministry. This was the
height of Espartero’s career as an embodiment of the national will:
his rule as sole Regent (1840-3) lost him the support of most Pro-
gressive politicians and of Barcelona, revealing him as the caudillo
of a military clique and a handful of civilian ‘unconditionals’. Both
Espartero and his victorious rival, Narvaez, could only act as party
leaders. Once they were mere generals they fell.
Divided and bankrupt as it was, liberalism defeated Carlism and
Miguelism. Not the ultimate failure but the early triumphs of Carlism
are astonishing. These were the work of Zumalacarregui, a retired
colonel with a genius for leadership : starting with a few hundred men,
favoured by the topography of the Basque Provinces, he built up an
1 Archives du Ministere des Affaires EtrangSres, Paris. Correspondence Politique
( Espagne ). Rumigny’s report, 28 March 1840, shows how little the politicians knew of
Espartero’s political intentions.
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army of 30,000 veterans, with an artillery corps equipped with captured
guns and melted down kettles, an engineer’s school and arms factories.
The discipline learned in small engagements allowed it to risk battle with
the liberal armies and lay siege to Bilbao. 1 This promising start was
ruined by division and discord. ‘The Carlists needed a man and that
was denied them.’ Don Carlos was a pious, uninspiring civilian, who
could not master a court split between responsible leaders and the
exaltados of Carlism, the ‘brutes’ of the Apostolico or Navarrese party.
The final faction fight between Maroto and the Navarrese generals led
to the peace of Vergara which left militant Carlism to a hopeless last
stand in the mountains of Catalonia and Aragon.
Faction only kills a dying cause : the deep reasons for the failure of the
extreme clerical right in Spain are to be found in its failure to expand
beyond the homeland of the Basque provinces and Navarre, which could
not support a regular war once the liberals had solved the problems of
recruiting and supplying a large army. The expedition of Don Carlos
which reached the gates of Madrid was a costly failure; the raid of
Gomez across the whole of Spain aroused neither resistance nor support.
Carlism was more than the desire of the northern provinces to preserve
their independence and their fueros against liberal dogmatic centralism.
Carlism fed on primitive royalism, on religious fanaticism, on the
economic discontents of the stagnant small towns of Aragon, on the
peasants’ distrust of urban civilisation (thus it was the conquest of the
local capital and its administrative machinery that appealed to the men
of the valleys, the victory over a complicated and hostile world). This
primitive programme, whatever may be said of later Carlism, made the
movement as inexpandable socially as it was geographically. 2 Thus it
could never attract the conservative aristocracy or the generals, and
the notables of Basque Carlism deserted the cause for a peace which
safeguarded the fueros on which their local dominance was based. After
Vergara, Carlism survived as a sacred family tradition, a faith nobly kept
in sterile and self-imposed isolation from constitutional Spain.
Portuguese liberalism followed Spanish precedent. The victorious
liberals split into a radical wing which looked back to the glories of 1822
and found its fighting force in urban demagogy, and a conservative
wing which relied on the court and diplomatic sympathy. Both factions
looked to generals for decisive support; the conservatives to Terceira
and later to Saldanha, who, after a period as arbiter, was led by his
support of the Charter into the role of conservative dignitary and
company director, abandoning his defence of Progressives to another
1 A good account of Zumalac&rregui as a soldier is contained in C. F. Henningsen,
A twelvemonths campaign with Zumalacarregui (London, 1836).
2 C. Seco, ‘Semblanza de un rey Carlista’, in Revista de la Universidad de Madrid ,
vol. xix, p. 339; and J. Mugica, Carlistas, moderados y progresistas (Madrid, 1950).
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‘sword’, that of Sa. As in Spain, the hold of the conservative-liberal
Cartistas, backed by the queen, could only be broken by a revolution
which left revolutionary politicians to face the claims of extremist allies.
The Septembrist revolt (1836), an imitation of the revolution of 1836
in Spain, gave way to the conservative Cartistas under Costa Cabral
who refused, like the Moderates, to work within the compromise con-
stitution of 1838, in spite of indirect election and hereditary peers.
Costa Cabral was an ex-radical who hoped to establish his brand of
conservative liberalism by a brilliant policy of economic development,
financed by Portuguese capital, a curious legacy from his patriot past.
As in Spain, the consistent support of the crown for the conservative
politicians drove the opposition further to the left than its ideas and
origins demanded.
The constitutional monarchy in Spain and in Portugal seemed to
hostile critics a new sort of feudalism in the hands of professional
politicians and local bosses. With all its faults, it was the frame-
work of a modern society. Traditional society had exhausted its
capacity to evolve : it could only appeal to the past, and all attempts —
and there have been many — to present Carlism as the vital creed in
nineteenth-century Spain cannot hide its purely reactionary nature.
Changes in Spanish society itself made its revival impossible. Liberal
legislation had destroyed the juridical and economic foundations of
the old regime in the countryside; in Catalonia a modern capitalist
industrial society was emerging, committed to liberalism. The com-
mercial classes throughout Spain connected absolutism with bad trade. 1
But the fears of the notables, inspired by the social revolution they
detected in urban radicalism, had already divided the liberal camp.
1 R. Ortega Canandell, ‘La crisis polltica espafiola en 1832-33’, in Estudios de historica
moderna , vol. v (Barcelona, 1955), pp. 351-84; and J. Vicens i Vives, Els Catalans en el
segle XIX (Barcelona, 1958), pp. 48-52, 227-43.
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CHAPTER XVII
THE LOW COUNTRIES AND SCANDINAVIA
A. THE LOW COUNTRIES
T he Low Countries did not remain unperturbed by the political
unrest which affected Europe at the end of the eighteenth century.
Both halves of them were involved in the 1780’s in reform move-
ments, some aspects of which were forerunners of the French revolu-
tionary ideas.
Dutch intervention in the American War of Independence (1780-4)
had only brought the United Provinces economic losses and a feeling of
impotence. The naval reverses they suffered were imputed to the stad-
holder William V’s neglect, and gave new impetus to the opposition
against the hereditary stadholderate, restored in 1747. At the same
time, certain quarters, inspired by the ideology of Enlightenment,
criticised also with increased vigour the inefficiency of the selfish urban
oligarchies, upon which the whole system of provincial and federal
representative assemblies was based, and demanded actual elections by
the substantial citizens instead of de facto co-option of magistrates.
Thus, at the very beginning, the ‘Patriot’ movement was split into two
wings: a conservative one whose sole aim it was to count the stadholder
out and revest the plenitude of authority in the patrician oligarchy, and
a democratic one which intended a limited progressive reform of power.
The latter was the more active. It even organised militias to resist,
if need be, the stadholder’s standing troops. The Conservatives used
them at first for their own purpose as a pressure group against the
stadholder. However, their unnatural alliance could not last. It broke
down after the Democrats had seized power in Utrecht in 1785 and
increased elsewhere their influence so as to counterbalance the Con-
servatives. This made the latter feel that the stadholder was a lesser
danger to them than were their fellow-opponents, and led them to pursue
a rapprochement with him. As usual, the small people also stood with
William. An Orangist party took shape, and civil war between it and
the democratic Patriots drew nearer. Eventually, Prussia, instigated by
the British government, sent troops, who crossed the frontier on 13
September 1787. An appeal by the Democrats for help from France
remained unanswered. With the surrender of Amsterdam (10 October),
the Patriot episode was over for the time being.
Many of its supporters took refuge in the Austrian Netherlands. Here
Joseph II (1780-90) had begun his reign under most favourable auspices.
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Taking advantage of the prosperity brought about by the hostilities
between Britain, France and the Dutch, he had been able to carry, as
in his other possessions, a flow of reforms, mainly of religious character
to begin with, such as granting tolerance, abolition of ‘useless’, i.e.
contemplative, convents, and the institution of a General Seminary for
the training of the clergy under government control. While these
measures awoke at first remarkably little opposition, after the end of the
war the fading of prosperity into a deep depression, aggravated by
bad harvests and dearths, changed conditions. The emperor’s ordinances
of New Year’s Day 1787, intended to modernise thoroughly the obsolete
administrative and judicial institutions, wronged numerous people,
deprived by these reforms of their jurisdiction or political influence.
Their opposition first used legal means, the provincial States refusing
as a protest to vote taxes; but Joseph, far from yielding to them,
went on with his plans and was clearly determined to use force to ensure
their execution. The ‘Patriot’ opposition, in fact, was double also in
Belgium. Conservatives, grouping sundry privileged circles, the Church
as well as the craft guilds, just wanted to undo the emperor’s reforms,
and first to restore the States in their original power: hence their name
of Statists. On the other hand, a democratic movement, consisting
mainly of professional people, represented the Enlightenment, as also
did the emperor; but opposing Joseph’s despotism they desired, like the
French Tiers-Etat, a bourgeois parliamentarism.
The outbreak of revolution in France and at Liege, where the prince-
bishop was driven away by a popular commotion in August 1789,
encouraged a small armed force of emigrated Patriots, united in their
opposition against the monarch, to leave their refuge on Dutch territory
and to invade Brabant and Flanders. The Austrians had to retreat to
Luxembourg. Obviously inspired by the American example, a ‘Con-
gress’ of the Belgian provinces proclaimed the independence of the
‘United Belgian States’ (January 1790). This was short-lived. Co-
operation between Conservatives and Democrats gave way at once to a
bitter struggle with regard to the constitution of the new state, and the
mob, worked up by the Statists, forced the Democrats to flee to France,
where their ideals were triumphing. Meanwhile, Joseph’s successor, the
more compliant Leopold II (1790-2), had reconciled himself, by the
Reichenbach convention (July 1790), with Prussia, which hitherto had
fanned the Belgian disturbances in order to weaken the Habsburg
power. The Austrians reoccupied the Belgian provinces by the end of
the year, and also restored the prince-bishop of Liege in his powers
(January 1791). Although there was no retaliation in the Austrian
Netherlands, and even most of Joseph’s reforms were repealed, numer-
ous Democrats remained in France. They were joined by many
revolutionaries of Liege, where the bishop pursued a policy of repression.
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All set their hopes on an invasion of their respective countries by the
French.
Indeed, the war broke out on 20 April 1792, and after Dumouriez’
victory of Jemappes (6 November 1792), the Beiges et Liegeois reunis
acted as his advisers and auxiliaries. They aimed at establishing an
independent Belgian republic, with a Girondist government; to
Dumouriez’ mind, this should be a first step to annexation. But
Girondism was on the wane, and the Convention decided on 15
December to call in February 1793 a referendum, by which a carefully
selected electorate in sympathy with Jacobinism should vote the
country’s immediate accession to the French Republic. Only in some
parts of the bishopric of Liege did the vote of an industrial population
of strong radical feelings favour the annexation. Elsewhere it was a
farce. It was only just over when the Austrian victory of Neerwinden
(18 March 1793) drove the French from Belgium, and operated a second
restoration of the old regime both in the Austrian Netherlands and at
Liege. It was of still shorter duration than the first: on 26 June 1794,
the battle of Fleurus tied the fate of Belgium with that of France for the
next twenty years.
This time, there was no doubt at all about the French intention to
annex their conquest. However, before actualising it, the Convention
wanted to exploit the country in order to relieve France’s hopelessly
depressed finances and supplies by imposing enormous contributions
and requisitioning commodities, payable in heavily devaluated assignats.
In addition, innumerable works of art were sent to museums in Paris
or elsewhere in France. Together with their anti-religious measures,
their robberies made the conquerors loathed by well-nigh the whole
population. Nevertheless, it was during these ill-fated months that the
country’s institutions were renovated in accordance with the principles
of administrative uniformity and hierarchy prevailing in France.
Municipalities, districts, soon to be covered by departments, were
organised, and by introducing its efficient judicial, financial, postal
organisation etc., the convention brought to a conclusion the modernisa-
tion of state and society which Joseph II had failed to achieve. Also the
bishopric of Liege, after eight centuries of independence, was now
amalgamated for good with the former Austrian possessions. On
1 October 1795 (9 vendemiaire an IV) the Belgian departments formally
became part of the Republic. Numerous laws, e.g. those suppressing
feudalism, seignorial rights, nobility and the guilds were introduced at
once; others gradually, e.g. the suppression of convents not dedicated
to education or nursing. Eventually, French legislation as a whole
was made applicable on 6 December 1796. Instead of permitting most
administrative and judicial officers to be elected, as the constitution of
the year III provided, the authorities appointed them, mainly in
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accordance with the tendency then prevailing in Paris, among moderate
democrats and even, for lack of those, among moderate conservatives.
After the crushing of the Patriot movement, the United Provinces had
decided, by an Act of Guarantee, upon intact continuance of their
obsolete institutions under the stadholderate. The Grand Pensionary
Van de Spiegel’s worthy efforts to extirpate the most flagrant abuses
broke down on the selfishness of provinces and individuals, and on the
bungling William V’s apathy, even in the case of the East India Com-
pany; only the even more moribund West India Company was sup-
pressed in 1791, and its possessions brought under direct government
administration. A more cardinal problem still was the Dutch attitude
to the developments in France. Patriot emigrants had formed a
Batavian legion, which took the field when the Convention in February
1793 declared war on the stadholder as a faithful ally of Britain. Its
forces had soon to retreat after the defeat of Neerwinden; they came
back after Fleurus. In January 1795, while Holland was threatened by
occupation, the stadholder and his family fled to England. As the
French advanced, the hour of the Patriots came: they were given or
took over the municipal administration, and thereby were able to call
the tune in the States-General. They proclaimed popular sovereignty
and the Rights of Man and Citizen, abolished heredity for all dignities
and offices, but otherwise confined themselves mainly to giving new
names to the existing institutions. Indeed, their major care was their
relation to France. Their hopes of French magnanimity proved delusive.
Notably, the new ‘Batavian Republic’ had to pay a heavy war contri-
bution; it was tied to France by a close alliance, which imposed on it a
permanent financial burden; finally, instead of the hoped-for gain of
Belgian territory, it had to cede to France Maastricht, Venlo, and the left
bank of the Scheldt, on which river the restrictions on free navigation,
imposed by the Munster Treaty of 1648, were lifted (Treaty of The
Hague, 16 May 1795).
By the autumn of 1795, economic depression caused by British action
against Dutch trade fostered impatience with the lack of profound
reforms, and especially of a government really representative of the •
whole population. Under the pressure of radical people’s clubs, an
election was called for a National Assembly, which was to draft a new
constitution. The franchise was nearly general, but corrected by a
complex indirect voting system. A large majority of moderates were
returned. The Assembly, which met on 7 March 1796, had little
difficulty with the religious problem: the Catholics, whose political
status had already been improved in 1787, as well as the Jews, were
granted full citizens’ rights, and the Reformed Church was disestab-
lished. More thorny was the dilemma of unitarism versus federalism.
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In the mind of the representatives it depended largely on the ques-
tion whether it was profitable to amalgamate the debt of their old
provinces. The heavily indebted provinces, mainly populous Holland,
carried a Unitarian majority. As for the degree of popular participation
in state affairs, it was decided that voting was to remain indirect, and the
franchise to be restricted to citizens of reasonable wealth. The East
India Company was brought under state control, awaiting its sup-
pression in 1798. After being adopted by the Assembly, the constitution
had to be approved by plebiscite. The Orangists were excluded from it
by the obligation for the voters to declare themselves against the
principle of heredity, but federalist and Protestant opposition sufficed
to cause the rejection of the constitution on 8 August 1797 by an
overwhelming majority (108,761 against 29,755). Everything needed
to be done all over again — a task set to a second National Assembly,
which had been elected a month earlier. The increasing economic dis-
tress, the example of the Fructidor coup in Paris, and the naval disaster
at Camperdown (n October 1797) strengthened radical opinion as well
as conservative opposition in the new house. Constitutional discussions
made little progress until the Assembly was purged by a radical coup
on 22 January 1798, whereupon it adopted a new constitution, strongly
Unitarian, and otherwise largely inspired by the French one of the Year
III, with two Chambers and an executive of five members. On being
submitted to the energetically purged electorate, it was approved this
time (April 1798) by a majority even larger than in the adverse vote of
the previous summer (153,913 against 11,597). However, the moderates
were determined not to tolerate radical rule. Shortly after the Floreal
coup in Paris, which also eliminated radical influence, a similar action
was carried out at The Hague (12 June 1798) by general Daendels, an
emigrant of 1787 and Batavian legionary of 1795. A third Assembly was
elected and an Executive put into office by it, both of moderate opinion.
The Belgian departments were naturally still more affected by the
developments in French politics. The election of Germinal, an V (March
1797), had been as conservative here as in France proper. Many
people, having given up their expectative attitude or opposition on
principle, helped to return nominees of the Right to the Five Hundred
and to replace the officials, formerly appointed by the French adminis-
tration, by even more conservative compatriots. These, anticipating the
repeal of the laws on religion, reopened closed churches and connived
with priests who continued their parochial functions although they had
refused to take the oath of hatred of royalty, the moral admissibility of
which had profoundly divided the Belgian clergy right from the
beginning. Instead of the change-over they hoped for, the coup of 18
Fructidor (4 September) took place. Most of the newly elected officials
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were removed and their predecessors put in charge again. In prospect
of the election of the year VI, the rolls were judiciously purged and
heavy pressure was brought upon the remaining electorate. Above all,
the religious situation deteriorated rapidly, the administration being
very strict on taking the oath of hatred; refusers were arrested and
sentenced to deportation, and the Cardinal-Archbishop of Mechlin,
Frankenberg, was put over the frontier. The few parishes whose priests
had taken the oath and could serve openly were boycotted by an im-
mense majority of the believers. The sale of confiscated Church
property was put through with increased impetus, which also offended
strongly the deeply faithful population. At the same time, the economic
situation was made disastrous by the paralysis of trade, the un-
employment, bad harvests and cattle-plague. The introduction of con-
scription (September 1798) was the last straw. Riots broke out in the
vicinity of Ghent ; stirred up by British and Austrian agents, they spread
like wildfire over the whole of Flanders. But both this ‘Peasants’ War’,
and the Kliippelkrieg which developed on similar lines in the forests of
Luxembourg, lacked organisation and armaments, and achieved no
other results than felling trees of liberty and destroying lists of con-
scripts and tax-payers. By December, it was repressed by French
counter-action. Hundreds of insurgents were executed, and thousands
of priests, most of whom absconded, were prosecuted.
Until the events of 1797-8 the Belgians had undergone with great
equanimity their political vicissitudes. Their natural loyalty to the
Habsburg dynasty had been ruined by the policy of Joseph II, so that
even French conquest had been considered expectantly in some quarters.
After the spoliations of 1795 had ended, still many people had thought
the new regime neither better nor worse than any other. The open
violation of the electoral results by the coup of Fructidor, the anti-
religious policy of the Directory and finally the conscription disabused
the Belgians for good and made their hostility to French rule nearly
unanimous. At the same time, the complete failure of the revolt
and the passivity of the European powers strengthened the Belgian
feeling of impotence against their masters. For the remaining period
of French domination, a melancholy resignation was to alternate
with hopes of liberation nourished by the varying fortunes of war.
About their fate in case of liberation, they felt still more vaguely.
Partisans of Austrian restoration were scarce; a reunion of the Low
Countries under the house of Orange, which was discussed by Belgian
as well as Dutch personalities of the old regime, attracted the Belgians
still less.
The Belgians’ indifferent hostility appeared from their feeble partici-
pation in the plebiscites of December 1799 (to sanction Bonaparte’s
coup of Brumaire), of 1802 (to approve his life-consulate), and of 1804
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(to ratify imperial heredity): every time it was considerably lower than
in France proper. True, the new ruler did his best to relieve the
Catholics’ grievances against the former governments. Many unsworn
priests could leave their shelters and reopen their churches, notwith-
standing the intransigence of exiled bishops who condemned even a
plain promise of fidelity to the Republic, after the oath of hatred was
abolished. The Concordat did its part to ease the tension, though the
renunciation by the Church of its property and rights, and still more the
Organic Articles, maintained opposition among some of the clergy and
gave birth to a couple of minor schisms. Napoleon’s renewed quarrel
with the Papacy caused the Church as a whole to turn again to opposi-
tion. On the other hand, the Emperor’s efforts at organising state and
society may have earned the admiration of contemporary lawyers as
well as later historians. Possibly, however, to the mass of his subjects
the perfection of his governmental system appeared essentially in the
shape of remarkably efficient and resourceful tax-collectors. We may
be thrilled by his breath-taking military successes, and so were un-
doubtedly many of his Belgian soldiers as well; nevertheless, the youth
as a whole attempted by hiding or desertion, from which again a wide-
spread banditry arose, to shirk the grip of conscription, becoming ever
tighter with the losses of war and the monarch’s growing ambitions.
As elsewhere in the Empire, educated people resented the suppression of
any representative government, and the ubiquitous action of the dis-
trustful police. Only very few of them, comparatively fewer in Belgium
than in France proper, were soothed by promotion to higher offices,
such as that of prefect. Nevertheless, if the Belgian departments were
always ruled by native Frenchmen, their subordinates, e.g. the vice-
prefects or mayors of towns, were now as a rule Belgians. Even they
were not always enthusiastic supporters of the regime, but many were
among the resigned. Since there was no other possibility, they were
prepared to accept honours and jobs from the only power which could
dispense them.
Among the sincere partisans of the Empire, most were buyers of
‘black’, i.e. Church, property, who believed that the regime was the
firmest guarantee against a restoration of the old order and the loss of
their newly acquired estates. Some of them were pioneers of the
industrial revolution in Belgium: indeed, during these years Belgium
became the birthplace of the new industry on the continent. Based on
an ancient tradition of workmanship and on abundant and cheap man-
power, due to recent increase of population, Belgian manufacturers
commanded the whole Empire and its satellite states as an outlet,
efficiently protected against English competition. After Lievin Bauwens,
of Ghent, had succeeded in 1798 in smuggling out of England new
cotton-manufacturing equipment and the mechanics to operate it, his
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native city became the most thriving focus of that industry on the
continent. From 1799 on, the Lancashire engineer William Cockerill
constructed textile equipment at Venders; after 1807 he made Liege
the foremost centre of engine-building in the French sphere of economic
influence. Trade was brisk and industrialists, if not the working classes,
enjoyed prosperity, until in 1810 many were ruined by a slump caused
by temporary saturation of the market. As for Antwerp, the British
command of the sea prevented it from reaping full advantage of the
freedom of the Scheldt; its improved harbour was mainly used by the
navy, which also gave considerable development to shipbuilding.
While government was stabilised in Belgium since 1799, it had still to
undergo several changes in Holland before reaching the same end,
annexation to the French Empire. Napoleon as Consul was most
interested in increased financial support from the Dutch and, in order
to obtain it, favoured a reconciliation with the old merchant class and a
restoration of its political preponderance. Since this patriciate still
clung to traditional regionalism, a new coup in September 1801 largely
restored their former autonomy to the provinces; a Legislative Assembly
would be elected only by the well-to-do, and would appoint in turn an
Executive of twelve members on a regional basis. The rapprochement
with the older social forces was also designed by Napoleon to propitiate
Britain and induce her to consent to peace. As usual, the new regime
was to be sanctioned by plebiscite. Indeed, the past convulsions, how-
ever bloodless, had thoroughly tired the Dutch of politics. This had
been proved already by their lack of response to the Anglo-Russian
landing near Helder in 1799, and now again by the minimal participa-
tion in the plebiscite: of over 400,000 voters, only 69,000 took part, of
whom three-quarters were opponents. Nevertheless, abstentions being
considered by ‘French arithmetic’ as favourable, the new constitution
was declared approved. With William V’s permission, many Orangists
accepted offices, now that the former oath of abhorrence of the stad-
holderate was abolished out of consideration for them: William seemed
to have given up every hope of a restoration to his Dutch dignities and
to be virtually renouncing them. The new authorities yielded to French
demands for contributions in money and man-power to the war effort,
but were not so servile as to neglect their country’s long-term interest.
Indeed, they strove for a status of neutrality which could revive trade
and prosperity. After the Peace of Amiens, which cost the Dutch the
possession of Ceylon, Essequibo and Demerara, Britain somewhat
favoured the plan, but Napoleon was violently opposed to it, and every
attempt to discuss it resulted in new demands and threats to Batavian
independence.
Nevertheless, the alteration of the regime of 1801 was not caused so
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much by a French will to combat Dutch neutralism; it rather aimed at
harmonising the satellite state’s institutions with France’s one-man
government. After a new constitution had been once more submitted to
plebiscite (but only 14,000 voters turned up out of more than 350,000,
with 136 voting against), Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck, a moderate
Patriot in the 1780’s and a realist throughout, who as a Dutch minister
in Paris had prepared the last reform, became head of the state (29 April
1805) with the revived title of Grand Pensionary and practically dicta-
torial powers. These gave him the opportunity to begin with relentless
energy and the help of able ministers the work of administrative and
financial reform, which was to change Holland into a modem state.
In his relation to France, Schimmelpenninck tried to save as much as he
could of Batavian autonomy, thwarting on the Dutch coast the control
by French customs over British goods. However, after Trafalgar,
Napoleon decided to tie the Batavian Republic still more closely to his
policy, in order to reinforce his economic warfare against Britain. On
the other hand, he thought direct annexation undesirable, because it
would hurt Prussian feelings too deeply. So he changed the republic
into a monarchy, under his younger brother Louis Bonaparte who,
after Schimmelpenninck’s dignified resignation, was proclaimed ‘King
of Holland’ in June 1806. This new turn also was accepted by the
greater part of the nation with resigned indifference. The confirmation
of all public servants in their offices conciliated them to the new ruler.
Many Catholics hoped that the reign of a sovereign of their own con-
fession would sweep away the discrimination of which they were still the
victims in social life if not in law. Most welcoming were the Orangists :
after William V’s death (9 April 1806) had weakened further their
legitimism, they could at least salute a monarch, if not a prince of Orange.
Rather unexpectedly, the hitherto docile Louis, otherwise a physical
and psychical wreck, took his kingship seriously. While his administra-
tion proceeded with Schimmelpenninck’s reforms, he tried to reconcile his
loyalty towards his envied brother and suzerain with his duties towards
his subjects. Thus, he was unco-operative in recruiting the troops the
Emperor claimed, and in applying the Continental System. He went
even so far in 1809 as to admit American vessels into Dutch ports. In
the same year, inability of the Dutch to deal with the English landing
on Walcheren led Napoleon to begin dismembering the kingdom.
Holland had to cede that island, and soon (March 1810) its whole
territory south of the Rhine, which was considered particularly difficult
to secure against interlopers trading with England. French troops
occupied also the remnant of the Dutch soil. Unwilling to play a mere
puppet’s role, Louis abdicated on 1 July 1810. On the 13th, Holland was
annexed to France and a French governor-general installed at
Amsterdam.
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French sovereignty was at first accepted as easily as all previous
forms of government in the past fifteen years. Trading people even
expected economic recovery from the removal of the customs-frontier
with France, a step which unfortunately was taken only in 1812, at the
worst of the slump, when it could not bring great solace. However, soon
the indifference of the masses turned into aversion, especially when
conscription, which had been staved off by King Louis, was introduced
by a decree of 3 February 1811. Frequent riots broke out, particularly
after the debacle in Russia became known: of the 15,000 Dutchmen
engaged, only a few hundred survived the disaster. For some time, the
outcry remained limited to the popular classes, the only actual victims
of the military machine. The institution of the Guards of Honour
(April 1813) also afflicted the propertied people and invigorated their
discontent. The tension rose with Napoleon’s defeat at Leipzig. When,
from 12 November on, Cossack vanguards entered the Dutch depart-
ments, when French troops left their garrisons in order to meet them
and French officials prepared to withdraw, reality was overtaken by
wild rumours. On 15 November, the people of Amsterdam rose in
revolt, and a provisional administration, for the sole purpose of re-
storing order, was formed under A. R. Falck, a former high official of
King Louis. However, at The Hague, where the people also rose on the
17th, events took a different course, since G. K. van Hogendorp and
L. van Limburg Stirum, both Orangists who had stood entirely
aloof ever since 1795, steered them resolutely into the channel of
Orangism.
During the riots, from 1811 on, orange cockades had often been dis-
played by the populace, which had been attached before the Batavian
revolution to the stadholders, and was prone to contrast its present dis-
tress with the embellished image of old times. The exceptionally stub-
born legitimism of educated people like Hogendorp and Limburg
Stirum had long seemed a blind-alley attitude, since William V and his
son and heir William VI had concentrated their activities on their
German dominions. Only after Napoleon had seized those (1806) did
the new prince of Orange manifest renewed interest in Dutch affairs.
In 1813, sensing the downfall of the Empire, he settled in England, ready
to intervene in Holland if opportunity arose, but without even trying to
organise a party there: in November Hogendorp did not even know
whether to find him in Germany or in England. This did not prevent
Hogendorp from sending everywhere over the country commissioners
to take over powers in the name of the prince, or from trying un-
successfully to persuade a meeting of pre-1795 notabilities of sundry
trends to proclaim William. Nevertheless the Prince landed at
Scheveningen on 30 November, and two days later publicly assumed the
name and title of William I, Sovereign Prince of the Netherlands.
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The building up of the new state was also largely due to Hogendorp.
It was clear to him as well as to the prince that a policy of revenge against
the former collaborators of French rule or opponents of the house of
Orange could ruin it. On the other hand, most former Patriots had
grown accustomed since 1806 to monarchical government, and were
prepared to accept William’s, if only it did not mean absolutism. It
was therefore decided by a Constituent Committee, appointed by the
prince, and in which Hogendorp played a major part, that the sovereign
should be controlled by elected States-General, consisting, in accord-
ance with tradition, of representatives of the nobility, the towns and the
countryside, elected separately. However, Hogendorp’s proposal that
a Grand Pensionary should exert extensive powers next to the sovereign
was defeated: the Committee feared the antagonism which had re-
peatedly divided the old Republic. Again contrary to his opinion,
centralisation, the advantages of which had been clearly demonstrated
since 1805, was preferred to regionalism. No discrimination was to exist
between confessions. Thus drafted, the Constitution was submitted to
600 notables summoned by the prince, and adopted by them on
28 March 1814.
In William’s as well as Hogendorp’s opinion, the new state, if it was
to be of some account in the future equilibrium of Europe, must be a
rampart against French imperialism. This meant the necessity of an
increment in territory and population. As matters stood, the only
possibility of that was by union with Belgium.
In the Belgian departments, too, France’s military setbacks in
1812-13 raised the first symptoms of unrest since 1798. Allied occupa-
tion, between December 1813 and May 1814, was greeted with
tremendous enthusiasm, though Prussians or Russians soon proved
little more likeable than Frenchmen as masters. As to the future of the
country, most noblemen and clergymen, probably supported by the
mass of pious believers, wanted a return to the old regime, and a
restoration of Habsburg rule as a means to it. Their deputies, who
conveyed their wish to allied headquarters at Chaumont (January 1814),
returned disappointed: Francis I was no longer interested in Belgium.
Yet the appointment by the Allies of an extremely conservative pro-
visional administration seemed to forecast a restoration of the old
social order. The progressive professional people and entrepreneurs,
averse to that prospect, saw the only alternative in a union with
Holland, whose new institutions appeared reasonably liberal and which
could, with its colonies, compensate for the loss of France as an outlet
for Belgian industry. This solution was desired not only by William
but also by the British government. In June 1814, Castlereagh persuaded
the Powers to support his plan to unite the Low Countries in ‘the most
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perfect amalgam’, 1 the provisional government of which was to be
assumed at once by William I. Some differences arose between the
prince and the London cabinet, among other things over the breakdown
of the project of marriage between the young prince of Orange and the
regent’s daughter Charlotte as well as about a settlement concerning the
colonies; these postponed William’s installation at Brussels until 31 July.
A fortnight later, agreement was reached about the overseas possessions :
in addition to those lost under the treaty of Amiens, the Cape and
Berbice were to remain in British hands.
The exact limits of William’s ‘increase of territory’ 2 were to be
decided by considerations of equilibrium and compensation. Should
Belgium east of the Meuse be part of Prussia together with the whole of
Saxony, and the Netherlands annex a considerable part of the northern
Rhineland ? Eventually, the preservation of the Saxon state caused the
attribution of the German Lower Rhine to Prussia, while the Nether-
lands received the area on the right bank of the Meuse as far as the
present eastern frontiers of Holland, Belgium (with the exception of the
districts of Eupen, Malmedy and St-Vith, which the Versailles treaty of
1919 was to take back from Prussia), and Luxembourg. What remained
of Luxembourg, as a former province of the Austrian Netherlands, was
to constitute a grand-duchy, in personal union with the Netherlands,
and to enter into the German Confederation; the fortress of Luxem-
bourg town was to be garrisoned by Prussian troops (January 1815).
At the news of Napoleon’s return from Elba, William assumed the
title of king of the Netherlands, and his small army fought with the
allied forces at Waterloo.
The task of amalgamating Holland and Belgium was tremendous.
Since the wars of religion had split the Burgundian heritage, the Dutch
in their insolent prosperity and cultural bloom were apt to despise their
shabby and backward southern neighbours, who in turn loathed the
selfish heretics in the North. The first need was to integrate both
countries, by adapting the Dutch constitution of 1814 to the new
situation. A royal commission, half Belgian and half Dutch, entrusted
in April 1815 with this business, had to reckon with the Eight Articles,
which the Powers had imposed on the nascent Netherlands on 21 June
1 The phrase used in the protocol of the Powers’ agreement on 21 June 1814 (‘pour
op6rer l’amalgame le plus parfait’). H. T. Colenbrander (ed.), Ontstaan der Grondwet, II
(The Hague, 1909), p. 33. The Eight Articles, drafted in consequence of this agreement,
said (art. 1): ‘Cette reunion [viz. of Holland and Belgium] devra etre intime et complette
de fa?on que les deux Pays ne forment qu’un seul et meme Etat’. G. F. de Martens (ed.),
Supplement au recueil des principaux traites, vol. vi (Goettingen, 1 8 1 8), p. 38.
* ‘La Hollande . . . recevra un accroissement de territoire thus in the Treaty of Paris of
30 May 1814, G, F. Martens, op. cit., vol. vi, p. 6. Already the Anglo-Russian Treaty of
1805 had provided ‘de procurer k la Hollande . . . des arrondissements convenables tels
que les ci-devant Pays-Bas Autrichiens en tout ou en partie ’ (separate art. 3). F. de Martens,
Recueil des traites et conventions concius par la Russie, vol. n (St Petersburg, 1876), p. 433,
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1814. These included the fusion of the enormous Dutch public debt
with the negligible one of the Belgian provinces, and freedom of
religion, violently offensive to most of the Belgian members as pious
Catholics. Having to resign itself to those principles, the commission
discussed mainly representation in, and the structure of, the States-
General. The Belgians succeeded, against Dutch opposition, in imposing
a bicameral system, with a First Chamber nominated by the king to
serve as a conservative counterpoise against the elected Second Chamber.
In turn, the Dutch firmly opposed a repartition of seats proportionate to
population: while the Belgian provinces numbered three millions and
the Dutch only two, each were to elect half of the 1 10 members. Thanks
to its social conservatism, the constitution was accepted by the Belgian
members (July 1815); but it still had to be approved also in Belgium by
an assembly of notables.
Immediately, the episcopate, led by the intransigent bishop of Ghent,
de Broglie, severely condemned as heretical the principles of freedom of
religion, of teaching and of the press which were included in the con-
stitution; their agitation secured the rejection of these principles by the
notables (796-592). ‘Dutch arithmetic’ conjured a majority only by
counting 280 absentees as voting in favour and by declaring void the
126 negative votes that were cast with the express statement that they
were inspired by religious motives: the Eight Articles were beyond
discussion. Nevertheless, the Church continued its struggle, forbidding
believers to take any sort of oath referring to the constitution, and thus
debarring them from most official functions. Meanwhile, moderate
Catholics pursued a compromise, unwilling to leave the whole adminis-
tration to Protestants. The archbishop of Mechlin, de Mean, a prelate
of the old regime — he had been the last prince-bishop of Liege before the
French conquest — declared in 1817 that the oath implied no dogmatic
concession but only a civic protection of the various creeds. After
Broglie’s death in exile (1821) this interpretation was generally accepted.
Another point at issue was the negotiation of a new concordat instead
of Napoleon’s. Naturally, the Holy See refused to let a Protestant king
exert the prerogatives granted to Napoleon with reference to the
choice of bishops, while William, in so many respects a belated repre-
sentative of enlightened despotism, was determined to maintain them.
After repeated negotiations agreement was reached in 1827. Before
electing their candidates, cathedral chapters should ask the sovereign
whether they were acceptable to him; in return, episcopal hierarchy,
abolished in Holland since the wars of religion, was to be restored
there. Dutch Protestants vehemently opposed the latter clause, and
William yielded to their agitation. On the other hand, his interpreta-
tion that his rights obliged the chapters to ask him for his nominee went
too far in the eyes of the Pope, and the concordat was never applied.
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For some time, the king considered organising a national Catholic
Church, as he had already given national constitutions to most
Protestant denominations (1816), but eventually he dropped this plan
also.
Another matter of conflict with the Catholics was the building up of a
state system of education. While in the United Provinces before the
Revolution many schools were operated by regional or town authorities,
in the Austrian Netherlands they were entirely controlled by the Church.
Efforts by Maria Theresa and by the Directory to found state secondary
schools had met with little success, and under Napoleon religious
colleges had sprung up again alongside the imperial lycees. As for higher
education, the ancient university of Louvain had been suppressed in
1797. In William’s conception, it was the task of state education not
only to reduce the excessive influence of a Church whose doctrine
proved incompatible with a modern state, but also to allow carefully
chosen teachers to awake among the youth a Netherlands national
feeling conducive to the amalgamation. Among the former high schools
of the United Provinces, three were reorganised in 1815 as state
universities, on the lines which had earned Humboldt so great a fame at
Berlin shortly before (1809). In 1817, three were opened in the Belgian
provinces too, at Ghent, Louvain and Liege, at the same time as state
‘athenaeums’ for classical education were instituted in all main towns.
Finally, in popular education there was nothing less than an abyss
between the cultural levels of Belgium and Holland. In the latter
Protestant country, the addiction to Bible-reading had fostered of old a
tradition of elementary knowledge without equivalent in the scarce
primary schools of Belgium, for the most part run by incompetent
teachers. If it was beyond the power of the state to found a system of
general elementary education, at least it tried to improve the teachers
by opening training-seminaries at Haarlem and at Lier (near Antwerp).
These measures appeared not to affect seriously the ecclesiastical pre-
dominance in Belgian schools. Many elementary schools were operated
by brothers or nuns, and the others generally supervised by priests who
also ran most of the colleges. From 1824, members of religious con-
gregations had to apply for official permission to teach, as other
schoolmasters had been obliged to do in 1822. Moreover, the opening of
new secondary schools was made subject to ministerial assent and
control, and nobody was allowed to teach in them without having
graduated in one of the universities of the realm (1825). However,
Catholic schools and parishes would only cease to instil into their
pupils or flocks the spirit of opposition proper to Catholics, if the
clergy itself were made tractable by direct state intervention in
sacerdotal training. In 1825 a Philosophical College, clearly akin to
Joseph II’s General Seminary, was created at Louvain. All future
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priests, before studying theology in episcopal seminaries, had to attend
its course of lectures, given by professors appointed by the sovereign in
consultation with the archbishop of Mechlin. The Catholics were
unanimous in opposing this institution, and the number of its students
remained low. Its failure helped to convince William that he must
negotiate with the Pope. His promise to make the college optional
(1827) was not carried out before 1829, because of the breakdown of the
negotiations; even then he still thought of penalising the seminarists,
who had studied abroad instead of at Louvain. Once it became optional,
the college proved superfluous, and was closed in January 1830.
Another conflict undermined the viability of the kingdom in addition
to its struggle with the Belgian Church. Its assignment as a bulwark
against France was not fulfilled, to William’s mind, solely by construct-
ing citadels on its southern border. Indeed, Frenchification had achieved
more lasting results in the Flemish provinces than it had elsewhere in
Europe during the heyday of this process in the age of Enlightenment.
In other countries, the romantic revival of native languages had swept
away the use of French. In Flanders, on the contrary, cut off from the
core of the Netherlands tongue for a couple of centuries by political
and religious prejudice, there was little common understanding between
popular dialects, so that they could scarcely provide a substitute for
French, which educated people went on speaking. It was a rock of
offence to the king that Dutch remained nearly as foreign to his Flemish
as to his Walloon subjects. How could the amalgamation become
effective if one-half of the realm kept entirely aloof from the other’s
culture? French influence was to be the more combated, since so
many French books and newspapers, in this age of restoration,
stimulated the Belgian Catholics’ spirit of ultramontanism. William
therefore decided to Dutchify his Belgian provinces thoroughly. In
1819 he decreed that, by 1823 at the latest, Dutch only was to be used in
Flanders for administration and justice; from 1823 on, it was also
gradually imposed in secondary schools. The bourgeoisie which could
not speak Dutch protested, but more vicious still was the opposition
of the Church. Since hardly anybody in Flanders had sufficient know-
ledge of literary Dutch, it feared that many officials, judges and teachers
would come from Holland, and that the true faith would be menaced by
the establishment of a core of Protestants among its Catholic flock.
Against this unanimous resistance of people who were far from being
all clericals, hand in hand with the apostolic zeal of the clergy, the king
backed out, allowing in 1829 the use of French in notarial acts and
promising to reconsider the problem with reference to schools. In fact,
the law had been ignored or sabotaged already whenever possible. It
had been approved only by a very few scholars who were conscious that
the Flemish dialects belonged to the Dutch trunk, and who were later,
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after the disintegration of the kingdom, instrumental in the emergence
of the Flemish movement. On the other hand, it had alienated from
William many people in administration or in the professions who were
partisans of the Josephist tradition of a lay state and had supported his
policy adverse to ecclesiastical predominance.
The king’s other Belgian supporters were to be found mainly among
the industrialists and entrepreneurs, who had welcomed the creation of
the new state and saw their expectations materialise. The first years of
reunion had been difficult, with overwhelming British competition on
top of loss of the French market. Moreover, interests were clashing
in the bosom of the kingdom. While the merchant interest, traditionally
preponderating in Holland, wanted a return to free trade, the Belgians
clung more than ever to the agricultural and industrial protection which
they had enjoyed since Maria Theresa. William’s compromise between
those opposite tendencies left many people dissatisfied. Peasants and
landlords found it difficult to resist the competition of Russian wheat,
more so in Belgium than in Holland, where agriculture aimed more at
cattle-breeding and dairy-produce; traders in Amsterdam and Rotter-
dam saw with concern that the downfall of their staple-markets, already
set in during the eighteenth century, was accelerating with the progress
of protectionism and the imposition, despite the Vienna treaties, of
heavy duties on transport on the Rhine. Gradually, however, William
leaned more and more to industrial protection, subsidising new manu-
factures by means of a fund drawn from part of the customs revenue.
This policy led, among other results, to the beginnings of industrial
revolution in Holland, where G. M. Roentgen renovated ship-building
at Rotterdam (1825) and the English engineer Thomas Ainsworth was
to introduce modern cotton industry in the Twente region. However,
Belgian industry alone could, thanks to its earlier development, compete
successfully on the world-market. Its prosperity, in turn, greatly
benefited the port of Antwerp, which progressed much quicker than the
harbours of Holland. Therefore, his Dutch subjects jealously accused
the king of privileging the Belgians.
In any case, the economic policy was so largely due to William’s
personal initiative that his nickname of ‘merchant-king’ was fully
deserved. In terms of a belated mercantilism, he considered a flourish-
ing industry as the basis of national prosperity. A reason for inferiority,
in comparison to British achievements, lay in inadequate finance. As
early as 1814, he had founded the Nederlandsche Bank to strengthen
the currency. The Societe Generate des Pays-Bas, established at Brussels
in 1822, was to provide the desirable means to industry. Indeed, this
bank, the capital of which was subscribed up to four-fifths by the king
personally, prefigured the Pereires’ Credit Mobilier of 1852, and has
remained predominant on the Belgian credit market ever since. Trade
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organisation was equally unsatisfactory. In order to further the sale of
national products, William, again with considerable personal participa-
tion, set up the Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij at Amsterdam
(1824). Indeed, this corporation gradually conquered for the Belgian
cotton fabrics the market of the Dutch East Indies, to which it soon
limited its activity. Other companies too were called into existence
with less ambitious purposes.
While the business people worked unconcerned with the trivialities
of political strife, this became more acute. Hitherto, elections to the
Second Chamber had aroused little interest among the limited number
of voters, and debates in the States-General were rather irksome. While
the Belgian Catholics were systematically in opposition, their liberal
fellow-countrymen supported the government’s laicism, and only
criticised it occasionally for alleged prejudice in favour of Holland, just
as Dutch members did the reverse. However, from 1824 on, a group of
young lawyers, graduates of the University of Liege, began to champion
a new liberalism. They were influenced by the teaching there of a couple
of vigorous defenders of popular sovereignty as well as by the con-
temporary development in France of a liberal ideology, such as that of
Benjamin Constant. Some of them, Lebeau, Devaux and the Rogiers,
were to be among the founders of independent Belgium. They demanded
direct elections instead of indirect voting, incompatibility of public
offices with membership of the Chambers, effective budget control over
the government and ministerial responsibility. At the same time, the
king’s educational policy unexpectedly converted the Belgian Catholics
to the principle of freedom of education, hitherto so strongly opposed.
If the older generation perhaps saw this merely as a tactical move, the
younger developed a liberal Catholicism, whose sincere belief that all
kinds of freedom were beneficial to religion was soon to convince
Lamennais. A rapprochement of both new trends of opinion was made
easier by the example of France, where Martignac’s ministry seemed to
recede from clericalism. This helped the young liberals to overcome in
turn their hesitations about freedom of education. From 1828 on, they
united with the young Catholics in their opposition against royal
despotism. Their passionate criticisms in the newspapers now for the
first time aroused widespread interest in politics, not only among
educated voters, but also among the popular masses, whom an economic
slump made particularly accessible to anti-government propaganda.
In the last months of 1828, a campaign of petitions in favour of freedom
of education and of the press was started, in which the clergy particularly
distinguished themselves as propagandists.
Indeed, as early as 1816 freedom of the press had been strongly
restricted in connection with the conflict between State and Church, and
now influential opposition journalists were being frequently prosecuted:
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the conviction of the talented liberal Louis de Potter (November 1828)
turned him into a national hero. Even in the Second Chamber debates
gained more vivacity, and to the king’s bitter indignation the decennial
budget was rejected in May 1829. Much concerned about these develop-
ments, William thought some concessions to be desirable : it was at this
juncture that he made the Philosophical College optional and amended
his linguistic decrees; also a more liberal Press Act was carried. This
encouraged rather than disarmed the opposition. A new petition was
covered by 300,000 signatures. The structure of the State came under
discussion: at the end of 1828 administrative separation between
Belgium and Holland under a common crown was suggested in a liberal
catholic newspaper 1 and persuasively advocated by de Potter in his
Lettre de Demophile au Roi, written from prison. William balanced
between further concessions, e.g. on the use of languages, and stronger
repression of the press campaign. During the first half of 1830 agitation
slackened, as compared with the previous year; but it subsisted, and
any incident could put the spark to the tinder. Indeed, this was to
happen with the French Revolution of July, giving birth to Belgian
independence (Vol. X, pp. 247 ff.).
The history of the kingdom of the Netherlands, between 1815 and
1830, was essentially that of the failure to produce true amalgamation
between Holland and Belgium. In the preceding paragraphs, little had
to be said of the Dutch. Indeed they played virtually no part in the
political dispute. In the States-General, the opposition generally com-
prised only a couple of particularly independent Dutch members, while
a large part of the Belgian representation, and eventually all of it,
usually voted against the government. In fact, the state was and
remained Dutch in its core, and its Belgian subjects always felt them-
selves strangers in it. Apart from ultramontanist qualms about the
oath on the constitution, their ignorance of literary Dutch debarred
them from a multitude of offices. There could be hardly any question of
posting Belgians in Holland, and the linguistic laws made them unfitted
for functions even in their native country. As far as lower jobs were
concerned, Dutchmen were also preferred for their superior education.
In 1830, for example, among 119 generals and staff-officers in the army
only 18 were Belgians. For this, King William was not chiefly to blame,
though his conceit contributed to estrange his Belgian subjects; but he
could not escape his own origin or that of his power. After more than
two centuries of association of his house with Dutch history, he was
called from exile by his partisans in Holland, while in Belgium, a
territory attributed to him by the Powers, he found no equivalent
clientele. Among his few supporters there, most entrepreneurs were un-
willing to participate in politics and administration. Only by an
1 Le Catholique des Pays-Bas (Ghent), 30 December 1828.
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uncommon detachment could he have disengaged himself from these
fetters of past and present. No wonder that in these circumstances the
Dutchmen’s sense of superiority over the Belgians was maintained and
aggravated. In 1830, Ch. Rogier rightly complained that Belgium was
no Dutch colony; 1 indeed it was far too often considered as such in
Holland. In 1829 a Dutchman observed that one heard in Amsterdam
as little of what went on in Belgium as if it had occurred in Mesopotamia. 2
Both peoples had entered their union in 1814 as foreigners to each other.
When they dissolved it in 1830, they were, if possible, even more so.
B. SCANDINAVIA
In the generation before the French Revolution the two Scandinavian
kingdoms and their appendages — except for Iceland, whose population
fell to 40,000 after the great volcanic eruption of 1783 — continued to
enjoy the relative calm and prosperity which had followed the end of
the Great Northern War in 1721. Copenhagen flourished as the
political and economic capital of the ‘twin kingdoms’ of Denmark and
Norway, with the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein loosely but (after
1773) completely attached to the Danish crown. Stockholm, though
overshadowed by St Petersburg, was still the centre of what was
probably the foremost second-class power of Europe, one which
stretched eastwards across the Grand Duchy of Finland and retained a
lodgment on the south shore of the Baltic, Pomerania west of the River
Peene, together with the island of Riigen.
Since the death of Charles XII of Sweden neither of the Scandinavian
powers had been strong enough to conduct an independent foreign
policy of much importance to the rest of Europe, but they were regarded
as useful assets in any major combination. Thus Catherine the Great in
March 1765 concluded an alliance with Denmark which was not
seriously interrupted for more than forty years, one of its original
purposes being the maintenance of the free constitution of Sweden, the
form of government by the four Estates which gave free play to party
politics and foreign subsidies. For ten years (1762-72) Catherine held
Sweden too within her ‘northern system’, a position in which the
Swedes could continue good relations with Britain but not with France.
But her distraction by the partition of Poland gave opportunity for the
coup d'etat of 19 August 1772, by which the youthful Gustavus III
broke the power of the Estates. Undertaken with the support of
France, this event inaugurated a period of French influence which
lasted until the Revolution, while relations with Russia and Denmark
continued strained.
1 In the newspaper Le Politique (Liege), 24 January 1830.
* H. T. Colenbrander (ed.), Gedenkstukken der algemeene geschiedenis van Nederland
van 1795 tot 1840, vol. ix (1825-30), part 2 (The Hague, 1917), p. 531, note 1.
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During the American revolutionary war, however, their economic
interests brought the three Baltic Powers together against Britain in the
Armed Neutrality of the North. This league championed principles
which had been previously asserted by a Danish international lawyer,
Martin HUbner, in 1759 — the immunity of neutral goods in enemy
ships and of enemy goods in neutral ships, except for contraband of war
and the right to maintain an effective, as distinct from a paper, blockade.
But the Danes had secured their own advantage by a separate treaty with
Britain, made earlier in the same month as the league (July 1780),
which provided that foodstuffs would not be treated as contraband.
This did nothing to resolve the question of naval stores, which were of
more interest to both Russia and Sweden: the former, however, was
not disposed to turn strong words into strong action against Britain,
and Sweden tried in vain to get an international congress called to
construct a neutral code.
The league, which had recruited only four other members, ended with
the Peace of Versailles in 1783. Five years later mutual distrust cul-
minated in a Swedish attack on Russia, aimed at the capture of St
Petersburg. The Russians were deeply involved in their war against
Turkey, but the Swedish navy failed in its efforts to support the advance,
whereupon mutinous elements in the army launched a formidable
conspiracy of the nobles, known as the League of Anjala. This voiced a
demand for the independence of Finland, where the Swedish landowners
hoped for oligarchic self-government under Russian protection. Until
Denmark as Russia’s ally sent the Norwegian army to besiege Gothen-
burg, Gustavus’s position seemed desperate. Then, with characteristic
resourcefulness, he roused the feeling of the masses against the Danes;
British mediation saved his second city, and Denmark not unwillingly
gave up the war. The next year therefore witnessed the complete
triumph of the king over the military conspirators, and although
Sweden had lost nearly half her ships of the line during the fighting, it
ended with an important naval victory at Svensksund (9 July 1790).
Next month the Russians, hard pressed by the Turks, agreed to a peace
without territorial changes, in which they tacitly abandoned any claim to
use earlier treaties as a pretext for intervention in the internal politics
of Sweden.
Since the main result of the war was a further change in the Swedish
constitution, it is appropriate here to trace briefly the internal develop-
ment of the Scandinavian countries on the eve of the revolutionary age.
In Denmark the autocratic monarchy and bureaucracy had recently
undergone change and counterchange. Between September 1770 and
January 1772, the 1880 decrees issued by the German physician from
Altona, J. F. Struensee, had brought all the most liberal ideas of the
European Enlightenment to bear upon the social and economic problems
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of the ‘twin kingdoms’. But the reorganisation of the law-courts in
Copenhagen, so as to establish uniformity and equality of treatment for
different classes, and a more humane poor-law system were the only
important measures that survived him , though the circumstances of his
execution and the banishment of the queen, a younger sister of George
III, who had preferred the court doctor to her degenerate husband and
was instrumental in his rise to power, gave the name of Struensee a
European celebrity. A strongly nationalist reaction lasted until 1784,
when Crown Prince Frederick at sixteen won an ascendancy over his
now imbecile father, Christian VII, and Denmark entered upon a period
of more durable reforms under A. P. Bernstorff. A Hanoverian by
birth and nephew of an earlier foreign minister, he exercised a wise
influence upon foreign affairs — he had been closely concerned with the
administration ofthe Armed Neutrality in 1780 — but he also championed
the measures which, before the end of the century, gave Denmark a
freer peasantry and a more liberal economy than any other of the
continental monarchies.
Denmark being preponderantly an agricultural country, reform began
with enclosure laws, the earliest dating from 1781, under which one-half
of the farms were enclosed by 1807. In 1787 the new government gave
tenants full legal protection against the lord of the manor, and in the
following year the status of serf — the person tied to the land by the
Stavnsbaand — was formally and finally abolished. Other measures
regulated the labour-services of tenant farmers, made it easier for them
to buy their land, and abolished manorial privileges, such as a monopoly
of the trade in stall-fed cattle. By 1807 the crops were three times as
great as they had been at mid-century, and only the landless cottar
class was still being ruthlessly exploited to produce them.
A liberal policy was also applied to commerce. Copenhagen was
deprived of its special privileges, which had checked the growth of
provincial ports; dealings with Iceland were thrown open to all Crown
subjects; and there was to be virtually free trade in com — a matter of
enormous importance to southern Norway, where the Danes had long
held a profitable monopoly. By the time of Bernstorff’s death in 1797
the tariff on raw materials had a maximum of 5 per cent, and it did not
exceed 24 per cent even on fully manufactured products. Yet another
aspect of trade in which the government showed a remarkable enlighten-
ment was that in slaves, which was abolished in 1792 with effect from
1803. The general result of all these measures was to consolidate the
position of the absolutist monarchy: grateful subjects erected the
Pillar of Freedom at Copenhagen in the year when the Republic was
first proclaimed at Paris.
In Sweden the reign of Gustavus III, whom their poet Tegner calls
‘the enchanter on the throne’, had results which are less easily assessed.
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In 1772 he had banished party strife by restoring the executive power
of the crown as it had been in the great days of Gustavus Adolphus, and
by making the summons of the Estates dependent upon the royal
pleasure. The only definite limits left to the king’s authority were that
he could not continue a tax beyond a date fixed by the Estates in grant-
ing it or declare war except in defence. The sequel had been an era of
brilliant cultural achievement, with French influence in the ascendant,
and of considerable improvements in administration — currency reform,
changes in judicial procedure, the strengthening of the navy, increased
attention to the needs of F in land — which party strife had long prevented.
But the nobles, who had supported the coup, felt themselves to be
insufficiently rewarded and seized their chance, as we have seen, in 1788.
The summoning of the Estates, which had met only twice in sixteen
years, was one of the demands of the League of Anjala: but when
they assembled in February 1789, it was the king who won the support of
clergy, burgesses, and peasants against the nobles, who were forced to
accept the Act of Union and Security.
By this measure noble privileges were nearly all abolished, most
government offices being thrown open to the unprivileged classes and
most types of land being made available on equal terms to the land-
hungry peasantry, a most significant concession at that date. In return
the powers of the crown were left unfettered by the intervention of the
Estates. This body no longer had any right to initiate legislation, and
taxes were to remain in force indefinitely pending its summons — a clause
which the king in person arrogantly declared carried in the presence of
the House of the Nobles and in defiance of the majority among them.
Three years later he was assassinated in revenge; his son and successor
was only thirteen, but the constitution was not disturbed.
Throughout Scandinavia, the direct influence of the French Revolu-
tion was slight. Gustavus III had been an ardent sympathiser with
Louis XVI; as early as February 1790 he suppressed all news from
France. The regency after his death courted, indeed, the favour of the
Convention, but the object was to secure subsidies and a counterpoise
to Russia: the so-called Swedish Jacobins were no more than a minority
group of nobles, who vainly opposed the absolutist system at the next
Estates in 1800. The tranquillity of Copenhagen was broken by nothing
more serious than a strike of carpenters in 1794. Finnish activists looked
east rather than west for inspiration. Even in Norway, where the rule of
the Danish bureaucracy had always been to some extent resented, strong
sympathies were roused mainly in the west coast towns, which traded
extensively with France in fish. But the agitation there demanded only
improvements to local government — and external measures to hinder
the interference of the British navy with their lawful trade. For the
conflict in Europe offered golden chances to neutrals.
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The Scandinavian countries were big exporters. Sweden sent abroad
about 50,000 tons of bar iron a year, half of it to England. Danish corn,
the timber of the Baltic coast and southern Norway, Swedish copper,
and other naval stores, such as pitch, tar, hemp, sailcloth, hides and
tallow, were all increasingly profitable in time of war. So were the
activities of the Scandinavian neutrals as shippers, middlemen and pro-
viders of entrepot markets. By 1805 Denmark-Norway disposed of a
mercantile marine eight times larger than they had forty years earlier,
and Copenhagen had achieved a trade turnover which was not exceeded
until after 1870. Some ships were built in Norway with British capital,
others were French prizes sold cheap: the Far East, the West Indies
and the Mediterranean, no less than home waters, offered profitable
routes for sailing under neutral flags.
Politically, the result was to produce a common Scandinavian out-
look which might have had lasting effects: in 1793 a Danish historian
on a visit to London posed the question, ‘What power on earth can
endanger confederate Scandinavia?’ In the first six and a half months
of war Britain seized 189 Danish and Norwegian ships with little
regard to the agreement made in 1780. But in March 1794 a Dano-
Swedish neutrality agreement was signed, each signatory to provide
eight ships of the line for trade protection, and the Baltic Sea to be
claimed as neutral water. The British attitude then became less harsh,
and in 1796-8, when the Royal Navy had to leave the Mediterranean,
neutral shipping was encouraged to take over the trade of that region,
including the importation of Spanish wool to Britain. Conversely, the
French attitude became more uncompromising; this led to the start of
a convoy system in January 1798, seven months before Nelson’s victory
at Aboukir Bay enabled Britain once again to enforce her rules more
strictly.
There followed a series of small-scale conflicts, when Danish war-
ships in charge of convoys resisted the British right of search. After the
third such episode a British squadron was sent to Copenhagen, and
forced the government to forego the use of convoys. But the new
Tsar Paul having turned against Britain, the sequel to Denmark’s
humiliation in August 1800 was the signature in December of the second
Armed Neutrality, in which the same three Powers made the same
challenge as before. Next month all their merchantmen lying in British
ports were seized; the Danish West Indies were occupied; and on 12
March Parker and Nelson sailed for Copenhagen. They acted with
great promptness, so as to neutralise the Danish fleet while the Russian
was still ice-bound in the Baltic. But Nelson’s success was also
facilitated by lack of co-operation between the other two opponents:
the Danes rejected a Swedish offer to fortify the east coast of the
Sound, along which the British proceeded out of range of the Danish
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forts, and the Swedish fleet was detained by its deficiencies (and un-
favourable winds) at Karlskrona. The Swedes offered no fight when the
British fleet found them there, three weeks after the battle of Copen-
hagen and shortly before the admirals received belated news of the
murder of Tsar Paul. Denmark and Sweden were therefore fortunate
to share in the concessions made by Britain to Tsar Alexander, who
had no wish to continue the conflict, including what was to them the
very valuable right to conduct a port-to-port trade along the coast of a
belligerent power.
They won more golden chances by the renewal of hostilities between
Britain and France in May 1803, and by 1805 the maintenance of a
common Scandinavian policy appeared fully feasible. For the battle of
Trafalgar gave Denmark-Norway, with its big mercantile marine and
vital sea communications, the strongest possible reason for not
quarrelling with Britain, and only the hesitations of Prussia caused the
twin kingdoms to delay in joining the coalition, to which Gustavus IV
of Sweden had formally adhered in the month of Nelson’s victory.
His action was meant partly as a personal challenge to Napoleon, the
result of a long visit to Germany and the impression made on him by
the kidnapping of the Due d’Enghien. But Gustavus was no soldier:
the abortive operations in north-west Germany ended with the sur-
render of 1000 Swedes to Marshal Bernadotte at the fall of Liibeck in
November 1806. Pomerania, however, where Gustavus abolished
serfdom and set up a constitution, might still be a valuable base for
British trade. Meanwhile, to the west of the Swedish territory. Crown
Prince Frederick commanded 20,000 Danes in the duchies. The demise
of the Holy Roman Empire had led him to announce the inclusion of
Holstein as an ‘inseparable portion of the monarchy’ (Patent of
9 September 1806) and to promote the use of the Danish language
there, with unfortunate long-term consequences; but his immediate
problem was how to avoid being drawn belatedly into the war at a very
unfavourable juncture.
The Berlin Decree of December 1806 was the prelude to a year which
tore the Scandinavian countries apart and has had lasting consequences.
The defeat of Russia at Friedland in June would in any case have left
Sweden in an unenviable position, but on 16 July 8000 British troops of
the King’s German Legion arrived off Riigen in time to persuade
Gustavus to denounce a recent armistice with the French in order to
take part in a new Allied offensive. The treaties completed at Tilsit a
week before made this an impossibility and the British expedition, for
reasons shortly to be explored, landed in Denmark instead. The
Swedes lost both Stralsund and Riigen and with great difficulty with-
drew across the Baltic. At the same time their relations with Russia
began to deteriorate, as Gustavus rejected the proposal that he too
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should come to terms with Napoleon. But Sweden had the consolation
that the British alliance both safeguarded her iron exports and focused
the trade of Britain upon her west coast: imports to Gothenburg
doubled in 1808, when the harbour was crowded with as many as 1200
sail awaiting entrance to the Baltic.
The plight of Denmark, driven in the opposite direction, had no
such compensation. The Order in Council of 7 January 1807, which
stopped the port-to-port trade in the Mediterranean, exacerbated
protests against British blockade regulations, whereas the same bitter-
ness was absent from Dano-French relations, so long as Napoleon re-
frained from applying the Continental System to neutrals. The belief
that Danish policy was now prejudiced in favour of the French made it
easier for Canning to act on insufficient evidence — a false report that
the Danish fleet was being prepared for sea and dubious indications
from Hamburg-Altona of an impending French move into the duchies.
But it was chiefly his sense of the extreme urgency of Britain’s needs
at this crisis that prompted Canning’s decision (18 July) to anticipate a
hypothetical French move against Denmark. The Russo-French secret
treaty of 7 July was not then known in London: its terms give Canning
a retrospective excuse on the moral issue, but leave it an open question
whether a less brusque diplomacy might not have secured Danish co-
operation with Britain and avoided a not unimportant forfeiture of
goodwill on the Continent. For Canning’s demand to control Den-
mark’s fleet as a pledge of her intentions rendered it virtually impossible
for the crown prince to make what his minister in Paris presented as an
obvious choice ‘between a passing danger to our mainland possessions
and the risk of terminating our existence as a sea power’. As it was, the
landing of 30,000 troops (including those from Riigen) and a three-
night bombardment of Copenhagen, which killed 2000 persons and
destroyed the cathedral and university quarter, forced the Danes to
surrender their seventeen ships of the line and naval stores worth
£2,000,000. But these events also made a lasting alliance with Napoleon
an affair not only of honour but of expediency: without their fleet the
Danes were powerless to defend even Zealand against him.
One consequence was a Dano-Swedish war (March 1808-December
1809). A French army under Bernadotte entered Jutland with a view
to a landing in Skaane; a British force of about half its size under Sir
John Moore arrived at Gothenburg. Owing to distrust of the Swedish
intentions, Moore never landed his troops; but the British fleet under
Sir James Saumarez played a more active part, covering the Swedish
coast and carrying away 7600 Spaniards from Bemadotte’s com-
mand to assist the revolt of their fellow-countrymen in the Peninsula.
Bemadotte’s force achieved nothing except free quarters for twelve
months, while the fighting on the Swedish-Norwegian frontier, which
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began with a small-scale invasion of east Norway, brought just enough
taste of victory to the Norwegian army to stimulate pride and popularise
its Danish commander, Prince Christian August of Augustenburg. No
territorial changes resulted from this war; Sweden’s losses were all in the
east.
In February 1808 the Russian army with the goodwill of Napoleon
opened its campaign for the conquest of Finland. The defenders, about
20,000 strong, withdrew northwards in the belief that the retention of
Sveaborg, the island fortress protecting Helsingfors, would enable
them to restore the position when summer came; but Sveaborg was
surrendered on 3 May without a fight. The summer, indeed, brought a
partial recovery, with deeds of valour that helped the growth of Finnish
nationalism, but the Russian forces grew to 58,000 men, who by the end
of the year had driven the Swedish army out of the country. By March
1809 the Finns were negotiating with Russia; by May the Russians were
in the Aaland Islands, poised for an attack on Stockholm. Sweden’s
only ally was Britain, who through Admiral Saumarez controlled the
Baltic throughout the ice-free period of every year; and the British
advice was to make peace. In September the treaty of Fredrikshamn
ceded Finland to Russia, together with the Aaland Islands and part of
the border province of West Bothnia, thus effectively ending the east-
ward expansion of Scandinavian power and culture which had begun
with the crusades of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
But a sequence of events had been set in train that was to bring Sweden
some compensation. Diplomatic isolation and military failure were
both attributed with some justification to the king; while the war still
raged he was dethroned by conspirators from the armies. The Estates
were summoned to formulate a new constitution for a new king, and the
throne then passed from Gustavus IV to the former regent, the younger
brother of Gustavus III. Charles XIII being both old and childless, the
choice of crown prince was clearly momentous. Passing over the young
son of the deposed monarch, the Estates twice rejected the candidate
who would have united Scandinavia, namely King Frederick VI of
Denmark, his chances being ruined by his absolutist principles. Since
his father’s death in 1808 he had behaved more autocratically than
before, introducing a strict censorship, discontinuing the meetings of
ministers, and ruling mainly through his military staff. Prince Christian
August was therefore chosen — partly with an eye to Norwegian
sympathies — and on his sudden death in May 1810 his elder brother
came into consideration as well as again King Frederick. Either of these
candidates was acceptable to Napoleon, with whom Sweden had made
her peace in January.
The initiative that brought Bemadotte to the steps of a throne was
that of a Swedish lieutenant of noble birth, C. O. Morner, but the
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controlling circumstance was the attitude of the emperor, whose approval
of a French candidature — though he would have preferred Eugene de
Beauhamais— was interpreted from uncertain signs as a direct mandate
for the election of Bernadotte. That the choice of a French marshal
would guarantee internal stability and might reverse the position
regarding Finland was certainly in the mind of the Estates; they also
remembered Bemadotte’s tactful handling of their fellow-countrymen
at Liibeck and elsewhere: but few can have foreseen that they were
founding the most durable of the Napoleonic dynasties. The ailing
king survived for eight more years, but Charles John (as the new crown
prince must be called) was in effect regent from his arrival in Sweden
in October 1810, with full responsibility for Swedish policy in relation
to the international conflict, which had already cost his adopted country
its hold on Finland.
In the meantime the Danes, through their enforced enmity to the
supreme sea-power, were losing virtually everything. Their last ship of
the line was sunk in 1808; by 1814 more than half the total tonnage of
their mercantile marine — some 1560 ships to a value of £8,000,000—
had been captured or destroyed; even Iceland was not too poor to fall a
prey to a dissolute adventurer, ‘King Jorgen’, whose brief reign was
terminated by the arrival of a British warship; and in January 1813 the
authorities were driven to declare a formal bankruptcy. But the collapse
of the old Danish economy mattered less in the long run than the effect
on Denmark’s relations with Norway, which had found itself suddenly
cut off, not merely from its administrative centre but from one quarter of
its com supply. At first Britain enforced a strict blockade, extending
eventually even to the trickle of com from Archangel, in order to force
the Norwegians to export their timber in defiance of the Continental
System. Then for about two years, with King Frederick’s permission,
British licences were used for export and import, and trade greatly
flourished. But in 1812-13, when Britain had both Russian and
Swedish support and less need for Norwegian timber, the blockade was
again intensified: the native crops were the worst on record, so the
Norwegians lived on bark-bread or starved outright. It was some small
compensation to Norwegian — and Danish — pride that their privateers
took substantial toll of British shipping.
When the century opened, Norway was roughly equal to Denmark
in population and wealth, had its own army, and provided the main
strength in men and material for the common navy. The peasants in
their lonely valleys were politically inactive for the most part, and
sporadic outbursts against Danish officialdom had been quickly sup-
pressed. But in 1796-1804 the travels of a peasant lay preacher,
H. N. Hauge, a powerful evangelist who also organised profitable
economic activities for the ‘brethren’, as he called them, began a
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national religious revival which in the long run did much to give the
common people purpose and influence. Meanwhile the upper classes
in the towns were demanding the establishment of certain national in-
stitutions, notably a bank and a university. After 1807 the circumstances
of the war caused the Danes to appoint an administrative council for
Norway, and eventually a Stattholder; a university charter was also
conceded. But the years of de facto separation nourished the thought
that Norway might be able to stand on its own feet, helped by its strong
trade ties with Britain. Alternatively, a union of all Scandinavia had much
to recommend it, especially if the popular prince Christian August had
survived to become its leader. Finally, there was a small but influential
group which already favoured a union with Sweden instead of Denmark.
From October 1810, when Napoleon’s threats forced Sweden to
declare war on Britain, her prospects for a time seemed scarcely
brighter than Denmark’s. Only the fact that it suited Britain to use her
navy, not to attack them but to keep Gothenburg and the passage to the
Baltic open for her convoys, saved the Swedes from economic disaster
during the uneasy interval before Napoleon turned against Russia.
But Charles John, viewing the prospect more objectively than a native
Swede could have done, was already deciding that a reconquest of
Finland, however gratifying to national pride, would be hazardous to
attempt while Britain ruled the Baltic and, if successful, would make a
lasting enemy of Russia. To take Norway from Denmark was an
alternative that would give Sweden a natural frontier and could be
facilitated by the offer of wide powers of self-government, which a son
of the revolution might readily allow. Moreover, to Napoleon’s
enemies this could be represented as a reasonable forfeit which Frederick
should pay for supporting him.
In January 1812 Napoleon seized Swedish Pomerania. His intention
was to enforce a stricter adhesion to the Continental System, but the
effect was to enrage the pro-French military circles in Sweden, making it
easier for Charles John to pursue his design as the ally of Russia against
his former master. In April Russia accepted a plan for a joint landing
in Zealand, which was to wrest Norway from Denmark before the
Swedes in return helped to create a diversion on Napoleon’s flank in
Germany. The plan was not carried out, but at Abo in August
Alexander gave Charles John still more advantageous terms for a
similar operation to commence in September — the month of the French
entry into Moscow. Thus the Swedish intervention in the war came to
be delayed until after the winter, when Britain by the Treaty of Stock-
holm (3 March 1813) became a party to the agreement, on the basis that
she would furnish large subsidies and naval assistance for the acquisition
of Norway, while Sweden was to supply 30,000 men for a ‘direct main-
land operation against the common enemy’.
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The consequence of this ambiguously worded treaty was that Charles
John placed his forces in Pomerania so as to threaten Holstein, while his
allies were demanding that he operate against Napoleon’s armies in
Germany: so far from doing this, he sentenced to death a Swedish
general who defied his orders for the purpose of safeguarding the
position of the Allies in Hamburg. Since no Allied troops were put at
his disposal to secure Norway for him, in May he offered to accept
the diocese of Trondheim (including all northern Norway) with other
compensation in Germany, but King Frederick rashly refused. Eventu-
ally, however, the military situation forced Napoleon’s enemies to
settle their differences: Charles John was given command of an army of
160,000 men, of whom only 30,000 were Swedes, and in return under-
took to operate first against the French. His defeats of Oudinot at
Grossbeeren (23 August) and of Ney at Dennewitz (6 September) were
skilfully conducted engagements which prepared the way for the Allied
triumph at Leipzig, but on all three occasions Charles John kept his
Swedes carefully in reserve. Having agreed after Leipzig to join in the
advance to the Rhine, he broke off to the north instead to attack the
Danes in Schleswig-Holstein. There were no major battles: with a
numerical superiority of nearly four to one, and the sympathy of the
German population in the Duchies, Charles John’s army was assured of
victory.
Nevertheless, the negotiations leading to the Treaty of Kiel (14
January 1814) were by no means trouble-free. Metternich was working
to restrict the gains of Russia’s friend, and Britain, while taking
Heligoland from the Danes, looked very coldly upon Charles John’s
claims as long as he failed to move Rhinewards; only the support of
Alexander, which he never afterwards forgot, enabled him to achieve
his main aim. In the circumstances it is not surprising that the Norwegian
dependencies of Iceland, Greenland, and the Faeroes were left in Danish
hands or that the Danes were to be compensated with Pomerania and
Riigen, proportionate relief for Norway’s share in their national debt,
and a payment towards the cost of the force they must now equip against
Napoleon.
The Swedish crown prince left Kiel on the morrow of the treaty, but
his army advanced no farther than Belgium during the last two months
of the war, while the future of France was unsettled. Only when his
hopes of preferment there came finally to nothing did he join Alexander
and the other leaders in Paris, to secure the promise of a renewed
British naval blockade and of military support for his acquisition of
Norway, which was now challenged.
Refusing to be bound by the Treaty of Kiel, the Norwegian people
had obtained a brief taste of independence. Since May 1813 their
Stattholder had been Prince Christian Frederick, the youthful cousin and
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heir-presumptive of the king of Denmark. It was clearly not in his
interest to surrender Norway, so he was readily persuaded to assume
office as provisional regent, pending the election of representatives of
the peasants, the towns and the Services to an assembly at Eidsvold,
where the members of the official class (who were in the majority) in
one month formulated a constitution. Then on 17 May the regent
accepted the throne of Norway as an independent constitutional
monarchy. These events aroused considerable sympathy for Norway
among the Whig Opposition and the commercial classes in Britain, and
Castlereagh was faced with the awkward point that international law
recognised a right of resistance in the people of a ceded province. To
avoid this issue, responsibility for the Norwegian uprising was attri-
buted to Danish activity behind the scenes, and pressure was duly
applied in Copenhagen. But Charles John was well aware that, the
danger in Europe being apparently at an end, the powers other than
Russia would welcome an excuse to deprive an upstart of a prize taken
from a legitimate sovereign.
Accordingly, when the Norwegians rejected the demands of the Allied
commissioners and resorted to arms, he was prompt to engage in the
briefest and least bloody of all his campaigns — a week’s skirmishing in
south-east Norway — and then gave terms that included his acceptance
of the constitution. On 4 November the king of Sweden was elected
to the throne vacated by Christian Frederick, on conditions which
implied the establishment of a union with a sovereign power rather than
the ratification of a cession based on the Treaty of Kiel. The Congress
of Vienna, then already assembled, offered no objection: there Denmark
was relieved of anxiety about her retention of Holstein, long garrisoned
by Russian troops, but was forced to sell Pomerania and Riigen to
Prussia.
For each of the Scandinavian states, the post-war period was a ti m e
of poverty and disappointment. Denmark was hit hardest, for her com
trade had lost its hold on the Norwegian market and was shut out from
the British by the law of 1815, while stricken Copenhagen had to
relinquish the commercial leadership of the north to Hamburg. The
staple industry of south Norway was also ruined for a generation by the
preference which Britain accorded to Canadian timber; Sweden, too,
lagged behind in industrial development. In each case governments had
to struggle to provide for a rapidly increasing population under condi-
tions of acute inflation and declining commerce.
Nevertheless, these were countries which stood out in an era of
reaction by comparison with the oppressed condition of so many
others. Denmark’s reduced circumstances seemed to bring king and
people closer together rather than to build up opposition to the
absolutist system, which had reached logical completion as recently as
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1800, the year of the formal abolition of the Icelandic Althing. Even the
revolutions of 1830 caused little stir among the Danes, and it was an
agitation in the Duchies with German support from outside that led to
the creation of the consultative provincial Estates. The Finns, too, found
themselves to be not unfavourably placed under the tsar, who in 1809
had promised them in person that his new Grand Duchy should be
ruled in accordance with the Swedish constitutional provisions of 1772
and 1789. Although their Estates were not summoned again until 1863,
Finland was given the Cabinet of a separate state ; retained its own legal,
financial, and military organisation; and had its frontiers extended by
the reincorporation of the territory lost in 1721 and 1743.
Sweden and Norway, however, are remarkable for their representa-
tive institutions, then new-modelled, which have survived all later
upheavals. The Swedish Instrument of Government of 1809 gave the
Estates absolute control of taxation, participation in the legislative
power, and the right to hold the advisers of the crown legally responsible
for their advice. A compromise between the historic traditions of
Sweden and the ideas of Montesquieu and the Enlightenment, the
system left much power to the king and the bureaucracy, especially as
the Estates need only be summoned at five-year intervals and their narrow
class basis was not seriously reformed until 1867. The Norwegian con-
stitution, on the other hand, owed a special debt to the French con-
stitution of 1791, though the ten liberal principles which were
unanimously adopted as its basis also reflect a knowledge of English
and American practice. Legislative and financial power was con-
centrated in a single chamber (working in two sections), the royal veto
being effective only for the duration of two parliaments, which were to
meet at not more than three-year intervals. As the franchise from the
first included all peasant freeholders and five-year leaseholders, whose
outlook was increasingly nationalist, the principle of popular sovereignty
asserted in 1814 led on naturally to the highly democratic, separate
Norwegian monarchy of 1905.
Constitutional differences were one of many factors that prevented
Sweden-Norway from growing together within its natural frontiers into
the substantial power for which Charles John had hoped. This was
evident even in the period of reaction after the wars, when small states
had reason to avoid attracting the unfavourable attention of their
stronger neighbours. In 1818, the year of his accession to the two
thrones, Charles John was severely taken to task by the Conference of
Aix-la-Chapelle for disputing the validity of the debt payments to
Denmark incurred under the Treaty of Kiel, which his Norwegian
subjects declined to recognise. Accepting the inevitable, he negotiated
very favourable terms for Norway, only to meet with unreasonable and
ultimately dangerous delays on the part of the Norwegian Parliament.
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In July 1821, when payment was at last reluctantly authorised, joint
Swedish-Norwegian military manoeuvres took place in east Norway,
and it is to this day uncertain whether the king’s intention in ordering
them had been to make the intervention of the Powers, busy that year
in Italy, a little less likely — or in the last resort to enforce his will upon
the Norwegians. The crisis passed, and Norway continued to grow
apart from Sweden.
In conclusion, brief reference may be made to the development of the
separate national cultures. Stockholm in the time of Gustavus III had
figured impressively as a home of the arts, with its National Theatre
(1773), Opera House (1782), and Academy (1786). The king himself
contributed prose dramas that outlived their author, and a galaxy of
talent adorned his court. Sweden also shared with Norway an important
peasant art, of which the products decorated the churches and homes of
the countryside. But with this exception Sweden was not emancipated
from a dominant French influence until the Romantic movement
brought in, along with German models, the direct inspiration of the
Scandinavian past. The members of the famous Gothic Society and
contributors to its periodical Iduna (1811-24) included not only Sweden’s
national poet, Esaias Tegner, and her first modern historian, E. G.
Geijer, but even the father of Swedish gymnastics, P. H. Ling: a mediocre
versifier, he sought the rebirth of the Viking heroes in flesh and blood.
Denmark and Norway had a single literary language, and it is
significant that the first — and with one exception the greatest — writer to
employ it, Ludvig Holberg, though a Norwegian by birth, brought out
every one of his many plays, histories, and philosophical works in
Copenhagen. But after his death in 1754 the German hold upon
Danish literature revived until the opening years of the new century,
when the misfortunes of their country encouraged the Danish romantics,
even more than their fellows in Sweden, to seek inspiration in past
glories. This was the case with Adam Oehlenschlager, whom Tegner
crowned ‘king of Scandinavian singers’ at a ceremony at Lund in
1829, and still more with Bishop Grundtvig, who turned from his early
studies of Norse mythology to earn fame as poet, hymn-writer and
preacher, but above all as patriot. He has been called the Danish
Carlyle, but the influence of such a sage upon the masses was far more
direct in a country with a complete network of elementary schools
established by law as early as 1814: for their existence made it possible
later to set up the Folk High Schools, where young men (or women)
of the peasant class were brought together at the most impressionable
age to be taught according to Grundtvig’s doctrine of the ‘living word’.
However, the first Folk High Schools of 1844 and 1850 belong to the
history of a later age. So does the appearance of a distinctive Norwegian
literature with the first great work of Henrik Wergeland in 1830; the
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beginning of a separate, rather artificial, Norwegian language with
Ivar Aasen’s Grammar of Common Speech in 1847; also the more
feasible purging of Icelandic from Danish usages, which began with the
periodical Fjolnir in 1835; and, in the same year, the publication of the
first of many editions of the folk-epic, Kalevala, which marked a
significant stage in the growth of Finnish nationalism. In culture as
well as in politics the peoples of Scandinavia, no less than the French
of the July Revolution or the British under the Great Reform Act,
were pressing forward into a new era.
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CHAPTER XVIII
RUSSIA, 1798-1825 1
T he end of the eighteenth century was an era of fulfilment in
Russia even if the abuses of the regime were becoming as in-
grained as its habit of success. As much of the Petrine vision had
been realised as was possible through the imitation of Europe’s political
and social superstructure rather than through the basic transformation
of Russia. The richer nobility had been entirely westernised, the
diplomatic and military tools of raison d'etat had been acquired with
the narrow industrial basis which contemporary warfare demanded
and with effective if wasteful methods of conscripting man-power.
Even some of the cultural insignia of national greatness were apparent.
With the last two partitions of Poland in 1793 and 1795, the empire had
reached territorial limits in the west that were hardly to be extended
until the mid-twentieth century. In the south the Black Sea coast-line
had been won from the Dniester to the sea of Azov and to the northern
rivers of the Caucasus. Odessa was founded by 1796, and beyond the
Caucasus the Christian kingdom of Georgia was becoming a voluntary
protectorate. From the Caspian sea to the frontiers of Chinese admini-
stration the nomads of Central Asia were increasingly submitting to
the political influence of Russian arms, trade and even culture.
As far as can be ascertained from the periodic and unreliable census of
males for fiscal and military purposes, the population in 1800 within the
new frontiers was probably nearer 35 than 40 million. This population
seems to have begun to surge in time with the similar phenomenon
in central and western Europe, although conditions were dissimilar.
In 1812, with some of Transcaucasia added, the population of the
empire was not far short of 45 million; the war had set it back slightly.
In 1825, with Bessarabia but still excluding Finland and the new Poland,
it was nearly 55 million. Of the round 37 millions in 1 800, Russian Asia,
that is the vast Siberian territory, accounted for two millions at most,
including natives as well as convicts, exiles and settlers. There was some
industrial but virtually no agrarian serfdom beyond the Urals. 2 In
European Russia over 90 per cent of the population must in 1800 have
1 The editor and the author are indebted to Dr J. Frankel for some abridgement of this
chapter. To convert a date from the old (Julian) into our (Gregorian) calendar, add 1 1 days
in the eighteenth and 12 days in the nineteenth century: e.g. 16/27 Novemberi796; 11/23
March 1801. The symbols OS (old style) and NS (new style) are often used.
a These figures and those which follow are arbitrary but in line with contemporaries’
and recent historians’ interpretations of statistics based on poll-tax liability.
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been agrarian and well over half this percentage were serfs attached to
the land and bodily owned by individual nobles. 1 Most of the rest were
so-called state peasants attached to public or imperial family domains
under various types of fiscal as distinct from the praedial discipline
applied to the serfs. The Russian empire was legally a class state and the
proportion between definable classes is illuminating. A compromise
between contemporary estimates shows beside the peasants about a
milhon and a half urban workers and dependants, subject like them to
poll tax and conscription and mostly living in the 500 ‘towns’ (so
classified as containing 1000 inhabitants), and some quarter of a
million ‘merchants’ and non-noble industrialists, including their
families, registered in guilds and possessing free status. All these classes
were defined by one contemporary statistician, Arseniev, as ‘pro-
ductive’, the ‘unproductive’ ones being the hereditary nobility whom we
may reckon at half a million in the first decade of the nineteenth
century, the officials including life nobles amounting to a quarter of a
million, the clergy, half a million, and the armed forces with their
dependants at well over a million. 2
In the first half of the eighteenth century the Russian peasantry, in
spite or because of the poll tax, managed to increase the sown area of
the country. Although contemporaries now started to complain that a
drift to industry and the towns was damaging agriculture, 3 statistics
show that this was only a marginal movement. Of more significance
was the migration to the Ukraine and beyond the Volga. Nor was either
movement uncontrolled. Runaway serfs were the minority. Most
migrants were directed by masters to their new estates, brought in as
domestics to the cities or licensed to move subject to the payment of
obrok (body rent), virtually a ransom payable continuously in replace-
ment of barshchina (week-work) 4 and arbitrarily fixed according to the
serf’s wages or profits — for he sometimes went into business on his
own account. For other than obrochnye ( obrok payers) there was no
relaxation of bondage, the rigour of which may be said to have reached
its peak just before classical economics and humanitarianism converged
in Russia to make the case for free labour.
Even if the American example is to be the yard-stick, Russian serfs,
particularly landless domestics, can quite reasonably be described as
slaves — although Catherine had banned the word rab, a slave. The
1 It should be noted that enforced concubinage was never legal or socially condoned,
although frequently practised.
3 A. G. Rashin, Naselenie Rossii za 100 let (Moscow, 1956), pp. 25, 28-9. P. A.
Khromov, Ekonomicheskoe razvitie Rossii v. XIX- XX vekakh (U.S.S.R., 1950), pp. 79-84.
3 P. 1 . Lyashchenko, Istoriya narodnovo khozyaistva S.S.R.R., (1952 edition), vol. 1,
pp. 362, 402.
4 Incorrectly translated as ‘boon work’ in the author’s contribution in N.C.M.H., vol. x,
p. 371 .
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serf had no rights of redress against his master, who could at will draft
him for penal deportation to Siberia, conscript him as a recruit for
25 years of military service, or put him up for public sale. The serf
could not own land apart from his inalienable stake in communal
tenure, and his chattels belonged legally to his master. A limit to the
master’s brutality was set by the law forbidding him to endanger the
life of his serf, but the only sanction was denunciation by his fellow
landlords, for the Empress Catherine had made the old resource of peti-
tioning the crown with this motive punishable by deportation. Yet such
a servile condition could be arbitrarily extended by the crown to state
peasants of semi-free status, and this fate befell nearly a million such
peasants who, with the land to which they were attached, were delivered
by Catherine II and Paul I to their favourites. Moreover, despite
Catherine’s declaration in her celebrated nakaz (instruction) of 1765 that
‘one must avoid making men slaves unless it is absolutely necessary . . .
for reasons of state’, serfdom was now fastened on the hitherto untied
peasants of the Ukraine, including even some Cossack frontier com-
munities, and on the newly acquired Polish provinces. Paul for his part
maintained the standard argument of Russian conservatives that the
peasant was better off under a patriarchal serf-owner than under the
soulless fisc, and he himself indeed was more successful as a landlord
than as a monarch or quarter-master general.
Yet, paradoxically, serfdom was still doing more to advance than to
hinder national success. Both the state peasant and the privately owned
peasant provided conscript cannon-fodder and both paid poll tax
(literally ‘soul tax’) — a few shillings a year — which nevertheless pro-
duced nearly two-fifths of the ordinary revenue in 1805. The state
peasants, too, were conscripted for essential services — posts and road-
making — but they were mostly subsistence farmers whose contribution to
the national income hardly influenced the incipient exchange economy.
It was mainly from the produce of serf labour on desmesne lands — in
some regions and instances already developing into latifundia — that the
towns were fed, raw materials supplied for industry and export and the
cultural transformation of the untaxed land-owning nobility financed.
Nor was industry itself yet based on free labour. In fact the metal-
lurgical industry as established by Peter the Great still depended on
peasant labour. Although non-noble proprietors could not own serfs,
they could use them in their mines and iron-works which enjoyed a
corporate status. Thus, in 1812, only about half the 120,000 workers
recorded for ‘manufacturing industries’ other than metallurgy and
mining were free. By then the Russian iron industry was in relative
decline. The foundries, huge by contemporary standards, had been built
beyond the Urals during the first three decades of the previous century,
and during Catherine’s reign they were less efficient than smaller plants.
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Soviet historians claim that, in the latter, charcoal furnaces 10-13 metres
high were more productive per unit than the new coke-furnaces in
England, although new English equipment was being imported in 1800.
Russian iron production was then the highest in the world — 12 million
puds or just under 200,000 tons up till 1806 when the Franco-Russian
alliance cut the demand for exports to England which had accounted for
up to a half of it. 1 The absorption of the remainder in Russia is an indication
of the increase in industry and internal trade in the second half of the
eighteenth century. Meanwhile foreign trade rose from a turnover of
some 21 million roubles at the beginning of Catherine’s reign to near
no million at the end of it. The leading export in 1796 was that of
flax and hemp products at 13 million roubles, followed by iron at
5 million; among imports sugar led at about 5! million followed by
woollen cloth at 4 million. 2 The fact that the official figures for luxury
imports such as wine were comparatively low, considering what is
known of the nobility’s standard of living, may have been due to
smuggling on a scale nullifying the ostensible trade balance.
The growth of internal and external trade hardly affected the agrarian
poverty of Russia; the thin layer of beneficiaries consisted of the
merchant class ( kupechestvo ), the highest of the three urban classes
recognised by the legislation of 1775 and 1785, which was producing
millionaires with incomes of 100,000 roubles in the 1800’s, and no less
the nobility. The latter took more part in trade and industry than the
equivalent class in western and central Europe; they owned a large
proportion of the industrial enterprises, while most of the hands
employed as ‘free’ wage labour were in fact their serfs, paying them
obrok for a licence to work in the factories of the kupechestvo. They
might join the merchants’ highest guild, the lucrative liquor and
tobacco monopolies were usually farmed by them and above all they
gained as landowners from the towns’ growing demand for foodstuffs.
There was by now no hereditary hierarchy among the Russian
nobility; status followed rank (chin) in the military or civil service of
which there were fourteen parallel grades; and, where the empress’
private favour did not apply, place depended almost wholly, and pro-
motion partly, upon social connexions with the court. The greater
offices went to generals and state servants of long standing, lesser ones
to members of rich cosmopolitan families, some of whom like the
Stroganovs were recently ennobled, and a disproportionate number to
Germans from the Baltic provinces annexed during the eighteenth
century. This infusion was unpopular but persistent — even to 1914.
Although, since the ‘charter’ of 1785 , the local nobility had enjoyed the
right to appoint to certain local offices, it exercised no power in the
1 R. Portal, L'Oural au XVtlleme siecle (Paris, 1950), pp. 374-6.
4 Lyashchenko, op. cit., vol. x, p. 415.
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capital cities, St Petersburg and Moscow, and even in the countryside
was subordinate to the centrally appointed governor and his staff. In
the capitals great landed possessions (always expressed in serf units, not
area) were valued as wealth, not power. At the top the nobility were
completely westernised, and French had become not only their language
of social intercourse but an alternative official language; it was current
in the correspondence of the tsarist foreign service until 1914. This was
the result of the urge to foreign travel and domestic education set in
train by Peter the Great. The children of the nobility were mostly
privately educated as in other countries, though less well. There were
one or two fashionable private schools and the state provided cadet
schools, the corps of pages and latterly the Smolny institute for girls.
The university of Moscow — the only Russian one since Dorpat was
German — had low standing; higher education, if any, before the routine
entry to the military or state service was generally obtained in Germany.
It suited Russian liberal historians in the nineteenth century to
represent the Russian nobility as gaining power at the expense of the
crown by their release in 1762 from Peter the Great’s imposition of
service and the confirmation of their rights by Catherine the Great’s
charter of 1785. This was not what happened. Although the charter
(paragraph 18) did confirm the right of the nobles ‘to obtain release
from service’, paragraph 20 reminded them of their duty, when called
upon by the autocracy, ‘to spare neither toil nor life in the service of the
state’. In fact a few years’ service was to remain a condition of social
respectability among educated noble families for at least another three-
quarters of a century; indeed shirking service might be treated as evi-
dence of incapacity to exercise noble privileges. Noble privileges could
also be withdrawn, in spite of the charter of 1785, on the Crown’s in-
struction; the Emperor Paul demoted a few hundred, mostly deservedly,
as criminals, and a number of these received corporal punishment.
Indeed, even a short while after the assassination of Paul I by leading
nobles and army officers, Speranskii could write ‘I find in Russia only
two estates, the slaves of the landlords and the slaves of the Emperor’. 1
The degree of subservience of the nobility to the crown in Catherine
the Great’s later years may be largely attributed, however, to her per-
sonal ascendancy. Adam Czartoryski, the young Polish noble, who came
to Russia with his brother after the final partition of his country,
described the awe inspired by the empress: ‘As soon as the name
Catherine was pronounced all faces at once took on a serious and sub-
missive air ... no one dared even to whisper a grievance or a reproach;
it was as if ... the most outrageous evils inflicted by her were so many
1 M. Raeff, Michael Speransky Statesman of Imperial Russia (The Hague, 1957 ), P- til.
For the continuity of the social obligation to serve see the same author’s subsequent Origins
of the Russian Intelligentsia (N.Y. 1966), especially ch. 3; also the Festschrift for B. B.
Kafengauz: Absoluitizm v. Rossii (xvii-xviii w.) (Moscow, 1954), p. 238.
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decrees of providence ’ But the last decade of her reign was an
anti-climax so far as the political evolution of Russia was concerned.
The French Revolution completed the disillusionment of the former
patroness of philosophes which the success of Russian raison d'etat as
distinct from salus populi had begun, the progress of her revulsion being
reflected in her correspondence with the German savant Grimm, the
most constant of her academic contacts over the years. The shock of
regicide in 1793 got the better of her self-confident serenity and led to
demonstrative if not precautionary measures in Russia such as the
banning of the word ‘republic’ from stage plays, the removal of
effigies of politically suspect philosophes from the royal collection and
the prohibition of some republican fashions of dress. Yet she seems to
have counted on France settling its own affairs, she foresaw the advent
of a ‘Caesar’ as early as 1791 and she was by no means active in the
cause of inter-dynastic counter-revolution despite the plans for this
which she optimistically drew up in 1792. She gave the emigres as little
cash — 100,000 francs — as seemed decent, and the 18,000 men she
promised to the international army at Coblenz got no further than
Poland where she described the anti- Russian patriots as being Jacobins
no less than the republicans of Paris.
Exactly how the revolution influenced the causes celebres of the two
men of letters, Novikov and Radtshchev, is by no means clear. Today
the long toleration of N. I. Novikov (1744-1818) seems perhaps more
remarkable than his eventual condemnation. His extraordinary career
as a philanthropist and publicist had begun in the 1770’s, his work
varying from the foundation of an orphans’ school to the organisation
and publicising of relief in the famine of 1787 — a provocation to the
regime as great as that of Tolstoy’s similar campaign of 1891. But his
main activity was in publishing, and the yearly output of books in the
whole of Russia rose from 166, when he began to farm the Moscow
university press, to 366 in the year 1791 when his own press was closed,
declining in the next decade to 233. It is clear that Catherine did not
want to make a martyr for political rationalism out of Novikov whose
satires she had herself anonymously combated in print as a defender of
benevolent despotism; but the international challenge of French anti-
monarchism tipped the balance against him. In 1792 she ordered his
arrest and he was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment for crimes
intended rather than committed. She delayed the confirmation of his
sentence and it was annulled by her successor Paul, who was motivated
less by sympathy for the victim than by the desire to countermand his
predecessor’s decisions. One of Novikov’s offences was his connexion with
freemasonry which in St Petersburg at the end of the eighteenth century
was identified with a mystical sect of the Martinist movement (disciples
of the contemporary French writer Saint Martin). Freemasonry became
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associated with non-conformist religiosity, incipient sympathy for
revolution and cosmopolitanism, all of which represented a challenge
to orthodoxy and autocracy, while its ritual and superstition dis-
qualified it from privileges which a Voltairean ruler might concede to a
rationalist heresy — even a republican one.
The second martyr whom the Empress Catherine supplied for the
hagiology of Russian liberalism, A. N. Radishchev, had been sent
abroad as a youth under the educational policy originated by Peter the
Great, and brought back with him the egalitarian and republican
ideas of some philosophes of the left, Mably and Raynal in particular.
Although a somewhat audacious commentary by him on a work of
Mably was published by Novikov, Radishchev drew no attention in his
career as a civil servant until in 1790 he recklessly published, perforce
in his own press, the Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow which was to
become a classic of Russian literature as well as social history, together
with an Ode to Liberty } In the form of a traveller’s diary, the Journey
is a tirade against conditions in the countryside, the horrors of serfdom
and the vices of the landlord class and of the government which profited
by it. The empress ‘read his book from cover to cover’, so she wrote,
and her careful comments curiously combined an acknowledgement of
the detailed facts with denunciation of the conclusions and motives of
the author. 2 Radishchev was sentenced to death on various counts of
disturbing the peace, inciting to disaffection and insulting the empress,
but Catherine commuted the sentence to Siberian exile whence Paul re-
called him in the same way as Novikov. Radishchev was even taken
back into the civil service in 1801, but the limitations of Alexander I’s
new deal disillusioned him and he committed suicide a year later.
The cases of Novikov and Radishchev were symptomatic of Russian
conditions, in so many ways contradictory, at the end of Catherine’s
reign, but not of a political movement. Separating them from the
Decembrist revolt was Alexander’s entire era of abortive reform. There
is only tenuous evidence to support those historians who are anxious
to establish the continuity of the revolutionary tradition. Although
Radishchev’s book did circulate before its suppression its lessons lay
dormant.
Incidents of such a kind had no bearing upon the morale of the
regime. Military and diplomatic success had aroused national pride
among the bureaucracy as well as the army even at humble levels; the
Russian achievements in the Swedish and Turkish wars since the French
Revolution, and in the final liquidation of Poland which flattered an
ancient national grudge, were rightly identified with the personality of
1 A. N. Radishchev, A Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow, ed. R. P. Thayer (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1961).
8 V. A. Myakotin, Iz istorii russkago obshchestva (St Petersburg, 1902), p. 221.
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the cosmopolitan sovereign. She was Felitsiya, the Russian equivalent
of Gloriana, apostrophised in an ode by Derzhavin, the foremost
Russian poet in the generation before Pushkin and a future minister of
justice. Catherine contrived to appear as Russian as her subjects and
emphasised the inheritance of Peter the Great. ‘I ask myself at each
instant of the day’, she wrote, ‘what would he forbid, what would
he do if he were in my place?’ Her depraved private life continued
without involving any inattention to public affairs, and this was known.
‘All is permitted to her,’ it could be said. ‘Her licentiousness was
hallowed.’ Indeed since Potemkin’s time her favourites had less
administrative control than ever. Platon Zubov held his morning levee
on emerging from the empress’ apartments and distributed patronage to
all except the greatest officers of state, but no decisions of policy were
in his hands. Catherine continued to work through her secretary of
state, the first members of the collegia of war, marine and foreign
affairs, and, more indirectly, the procurator of the Senate. The original
collegiate system of committee administration was falling into disuse
and was to decline further in Paul I’s reign, the royal council which
Catherine had remodelled as the ‘council of her Majesty’ rarely met,
and the so-called ‘directing’ Senate was in fact losing all but the
functions of promulgating imperial decrees and acting as a supreme
appeal tribunal — one whose business was notoriously in arrear. Passive
malcontents who saw the other side of the picture owing to their interests
or principles included the Tsarevich Paul and his son the future
Alexander I. As the son of Peter III, Paul had been excluded from the
throne by his mother’s coup d'etat. The empress had isolated him from
public affairs, deprived him of his children, governed in consort with
her favourite, Potemkin, and so placed her morose and disagreeable
son in a Hamlet-like situation. Latterly, Paul had been permitted to live
in Gachina, a property near St Petersburg where he exercised the private
army of 2000 troops permitted him in obsolete pseudo-Prussian
drill and uniforms.
Alexander was deeply involved in these family and dynastic tensions
during his boyhood, and the tragic career of his father undoubtedly
had through him an indirect but powerful effect on the history of
Russia. His mind was formed — or one might say divided for life— by
two influences: Gachina to which the empress allowed him increasing
access, and formal education by the Swiss Frederick La Harpe whom she
appointed as his tutor in 1784. La Harpe belonged in his opinions to
the left wing of the Enlightenment; and as a native of Vaud, resenting the
overlordship of Bern, he was sympathetic to the French Revolution and
the French intervention in his country. Still he held his post until the
end of 1794, following Rousseau’s educational principles and reading
with his pupil classics of contemporary as well as ancient republicanism.
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It is to the credit of both that he retained Alexander’s lifelong friendship.
To La Harpe’s proto-romantic radicalism the corrupt regime of
Catherine was not congenial. It was no more congenial, in spite of its
success in war, to the militarism of the orderly room and the barrack
square, rather than the battlefield, which Gachina represented and
which Alexander inherited. So in 1796 at the age of eighteen the future
emperor was writing to his friend the future chancellor, Viktor
Kochubei, that he wanted to renounce his inheritance and live privately
with his wife (Elizabeth of Baden whom he had married the previous
year) ‘on the banks of the Rhine’. He described by name the most
powerful men at his grandmother’s court as people he ‘would not have
as menials’, and complained that ‘our affairs are in incredible disorder,
people steal right and left . . . and the Empire does nothing but extend
its territory . . .’. This declaration marked an important stage in the
development of Alexander’s character and he revealed similar senti-
ments to Czartoryski shortly afterwards. To Czartoryski he confided his
open-hearted sympathy for dismembered Poland and even revealed an
enlightened respect for the motives and achievements, although not for
the violence, of the French Revolution. It is from this remarkable
interview that their long intimacy, and indeed Alexander’s commitment
to Poland, can be traced.
It is probable that Catherine had long intended to nominate Alexander
rather than Paul as her successor, and a letter of Alexander to the
empress in September 1796 can be interpreted as reluctant acceptance
of the empress’s intention. 1 But when Catherine died on 16/27
November no official steps had been taken and Alexander had already
sent for his father. The succession took place without any hesitations,
but it was characteristic of the regime that when the first messenger, one
of the Zubovs, arrived at Gachina Paul had expected some more fatal
summons and exclaimed to his wife ‘ nous sommes perdus’. There
was no prospect of the new tsar introducing fundamental changes and
even his largely demonstrative minor ones have been exaggerated by
contemporaries and by historians. E nmi ty towards the nobility as a
caste, recurrent in the history of tsardom, was strengthened in Paul’s
case by jealousy of the nobility’s exceptional alliance with his mother
and by the isolation of his own far from aristocratic regime at Gachina.
But his feud was rather with the symbols of his mother’s rule than with
its institutions or its secondary personnel. So the elderly Orlov as an
assassin of Peter III in Catherine’s interest was made to carry his
victim’s crown in a ceremony for reinterring Paul’s putative father
together with Catherine the Great, while Potemkin’s tomb was broken
1 N. K. Shilder, Imperator Aleksandr I (St Petersburg, 1904), vol. 1, p. 279 (appendix).
The extensive inferences and conjectures of Shilder and many other historians are quite
arbitrary.
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up and his remains buried in obscurity. Yet most of the great officers
of state in 1796 retained their posts and even the infusion of Gachina
personnel into the army, much resented as it was, did not take place at
the top. Again it was the symbol, the introduction of Gachina uniforms,
that counted.
That Paul at first showed some ‘talent as a ruler’ was admitted by
one of the accessories to his murder, General Bennigsen. The German,
Groeben, who found the absenteeism of the bureaucracy such that ‘the
vast and spacious offices of departments were frequented only by rats
and mice ’ gave Paul credit for energising the Senate as a court of appeal
so that it settled 11,000 outstanding cases in the first year of his reign.
He approved, too, a new regularity in the paying of troops though he
condemned the new uniforms. Less familiar uses of capricious despot-
ism appeared in such instances as Paul’s responsibility for the import of
English textile machinery and his instructions that the report of a
Moscow apothecary’s process for producing beet sugar should be
followed up — thus anticipating, if not introducing, two major fines of
Russian industry. Paul’s well known definition in his coronation
manifesto of the serfs’ labour services to their masters was, however, less
effective than is commonly supposed. Although week-work on Sundays
and Feast Days was categorically forbidden, its limitation to three days
weekly was expressed hypothetically. 1 Apart from being ineffective, it
stimulated the wildest hopes of emancipation and led to peasant dis-
turbances which Paul effectively suppressed. If this and similar pro-
hibitions were in reality no evidence of a genuine liberalism, still less
were they intended as a challenge to the rights and interests of the
nobility. None of his predecessors turned so many state peasants into
private serfs in so short a time and, in the same year as his edict on week-
work, Paul showed his concern for the nobility by approving the
foundation of a nobles’ land bank to check the scandal of usurious
mortgages. The fact was that his grudge against the previous regime
left him with no loyalty to precedent or to the status quo, his con-
servative inhibitions were his own. So in the case of Poland he de-
precated the final partition and declared that he would have made
restitution if things had not gone too far. He summoned the ex-
king Stanislas to his coronation, showing him royal honours but
a lack of personal consideration. It was rather his mother’s hostage,
Czartoryski, who profited in place and favour from this respect for his
country.
The tyrannical caprices which were Paul’s undoing began with a ban
on articles of dress reflecting French revolutionary fashion. In the same
spirit, not only was the sensibly clothed Russian army given new and
1 Polnoe Sobrmie Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii (Collection of Laws of the Russian
Empire) (S.P. 1839-43), vol. xxiv, No. 17909.
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unpractical uniforms of obsolete Prussian pattern, but the pigtail and
powder were reintroduced as symbols of the old regime’s discipline.
When the great field-marshal Suvorov criticised this, he was banished to
his estate until required again for service in his famous Italian campaign
of 1799. In the capital Paul’s sense of insecurity and his mania for
discipline put the civilian public under intolerable rules of protocol.
The self-government of the nobility by their provincial corporations
under the charter of 1785 was transgressed; nobles were deprived of their
status to make them liable to corporal punishment, and the lower
clergy as a whole was deprived of its exemption from flogging. The fear
of revolution led to the closing once more of all private printing presses
in Russia and eventually to the prohibition of any printed or manu-
script works from abroad. But it was Paul’s treatment of the officers of
the army which was crucial. Transfers, demotion, the recall to service
of officers in civilian and court posts, appeared not as a vast reform but
as an exercise in tyranny. The garrison of the capital lived under a
kind of parade-ground terror, and it became a common thing for officers
to parade with their affairs wound up and with a stock of ready money
lest they were sent off the square straight to Siberia.
Already in 1797 Alexander was complaining to La Harpe that ‘every-
thing has been turned upside-down and this has only increased the
confusion’ and he was asking ‘guidance on a matter of the greatest
importance, that is to give Russia the blessing of a free constitution’.
Historians, following Alexander’s friends and contemporaries, have
tended to neglect the compromising element in this letter. When and
how did Alexander envisage this fundamental reform, his father being a
vigorous man of forty-three ? So far as we know there was no conspiracy
to which Alexander could, let alone would, have lent himself at this
stage, but his ideas and words reflect perhaps the impression of
impermanence belonging to Paul’s psychopathic rulership. Alexander
had now gathered, as he told La Harpe, a certain circle of like-minded
political friends who were, as it turned out, to form or fail to form his
domestic policy in the first three years of his own reign and who were
individually to receive for long his intimate confidence and his friend-
ship indefinitely. First there was Prince Adam Czartoryski, secondly
Czartoryski’s friend Count Paul Stroganov, the son of a rich and famous
family though of comparatively recent nobility and himself a parlour
Jacobin in his recent boyhood. Then there was Novosiltsev, Stroganov’s
cousin, and finally Count Viktor Kochubei, a nephew of the chancellor,
Bezborodko, and already a man of experience in diplomacy and
administration. Alexander’s loyalty did not belong exclusively to this
group. Parade-ground discipline of the Gachina type was represented
by a man whom Paul had promoted from obscurity and who had become
his son’s friend too. This was A. Arakcheev, a man vilified by virtually
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all historians. Inhumane and obscurantist, he was nonetheless in-
corruptible, and efficient as an administrator although not as a soldier
in the field. Alexander was to give him more frequent spells of in-
creasing power in the course of his reign until he finally took over
unofficially the whole routine work of the empire and gave his name to
an era in Russian history, the brief Arakcheev shchina.
There are some grounds for attributing the origin of the conspiracy
against Paul to the English ambassador Whitworth. The leader of the
conspiracy. Count N. P. Panin, was a friend of the ambassador and
supported the pro-English international policy which was reversed only
late in 1799. It is plausible to suppose that Whitworth suggested a
regency of the English type as a formula which might prove acceptable
to the Tsarevich Alexander. But relations with England deteriorated and,
as Whitworth left Russia with his mission in May 1800, it is not possible
to justify the Soviet textbook doctrine that English machinations were
responsible for the actual assassination of Paul ten months later. In
the course of this period Panin lost his post of vice-chancellor and his
access to Paul, so the leadership of the plot was taken over by the military
governor of Moscow, P. von der Pahlen. It is probable that the delay
was due to Alexander’s hesitation to give his consent. He had been
approached by Panin, but how and when he agreed to enforced abdica-
tion — it is impossible to believe that he ever agreed to assassination — is
unknown. As the plot developed, the two ablest men who could best
work with Paul, Arakcheev and Rostopchin, and who might perhaps
have saved him, were temporarily out of favour and away from the
capital. So were, to the advantage of their future influence as being
immune from suspicion, Alexander’s three intimates Czartoryski,
Novosiltsev and Kochubei. In the early months of 1801 Paul’s actions
and intentions became more evidently unbalanced and when Pahlen
acted on the night of 11/23 March there is some (if inadequate) evi-
dence that he forestalled measures which Paul intended against his
own family, as he had become estranged from his wife and suspicious of
Alexander. In form the coup followed the Russian pattern of action by
senior officers and suborned guards. A bid for the succession by the
Empress Maria Fedorovna, suspecting her son’s complicity, left the
household troops unmoved and was brushed aside by Bennigsen.
Alexander was sent for and began his reign in tears. ‘That is enough of
acting like a child,’ Pahlen is reported to have said. ‘Now go and reign;
show yourself to the troops.’
The successful conspiracy tended to perpetuate the political tradition
in Russia of reform by assassination, a tradition which can be discovered
again in the Decembrist mutiny and in the revolutionary terrorism of
later years. According to Czartoryski, Alexander himself was per-
manently affected by the trauma of his accession. His responsibility for
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regicide, however tenuous, seems to have inclined his sensitive nature
to the extremes of cynicism and mysticism. ‘There is no remedy,’ he
told Czartoryski, ‘I must suffer, this cannot change.’ Moreover, the
assassination re-opened that breach between the crown and the nobility
which Catherine II had almost closed but which henceforward was to
characterise the dynasty and to deter it from sharing its power even
with the privileged classes.
The general joy at the change of regime, most marked in the capital
cities and among the military and service nobility, was described by an
Austrian diplomat as the normal reaction to the death of every Russian
ruler, not excluding Catherine. Yet a revolution in political as distinct
from national life was immediate. Alexander put administration in the
hands of two of his grandmother’s great officers of state, making the
retired general Bekleshev procurator-general or virtual chief minister,
and calling upon D. P. Troshchinskii, a former holder of that office,
to be as he put it ‘my guide’. The latter drafted the accession manifesto
which bore no trace of the revolutionary liberalism mooted with his
political friends by Alexander while tsarevich. Now he promised to
‘rule the people entrusted to us by God according to the laws and spirit
of our august late grandmother’. This was the policy of the conspirators
and indeed Alexander kept Pahlen in office and brought back Panin,
greeting hi m with the words: ‘alas, things have not turned out as we
thought.’ They were both to be retained for a few months until the
young emperor had found his feet and indiscretion or insolence led to
their permanent banishment and disgrace. In the undoing of his
father’s caprices the most urgent action seems to have been remembered
by Alexander himself on the night of the murder. This was the recall
of an ill-found Cossack army dispatched by Paul on a desperate mission
through Central Asia against India as a crazy demonstration of his
united front with Napoleon against England. There was a general
reversal to normalcy during the next three months. Imports and
exports, from bread and liquor to books and music, were freed ; frontiers
re-opened to travellers; private printing re-licensed; Catherine’s
‘charters’ to the nobility and towns renewed, and the clergy once again
exempted from corporal punishment. ‘ Secret deportation,’ a process of
exile by administrative order, was nominally abolished although it was
in fact to survive under a different name.
These were the achievements of the old school of administrators.
Meanwhile Alexander had brought back to Russia the political friends
of his minority whom Paul had dispersed: Kochubei, Czartoryski and
N. N. Novosiltsev to join P. A. Stroganov who was already in St
Petersburg, in the ‘party of the young men’ as their conservative critics
began to call them. They were to meet more regularly now as a semi-
official brains trust but still nominally as an ‘unofficial’ committee with
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agenda ranging from projects for a constitution and the reform of
serfdom to the consideration of practical draft legislation issuing from
official sources. Outside these two parties of the young and the old,
Arakcheev (whom both were to loathe) had not yet been brought back
into council; but Alexander was also influenced by his civil and
military aides de camp, in particular by the ambitious and anti-Polish
rival of Czartoryski, Prince P. P. Dolgorukov. Then there was La Harpe
who, fresh from participation in the reform of Swiss institutions, con-
tinued to advise and admonish Alexander with impunity.
It probably accorded well with Alexander’s unstable temperament
to be able to work with groups which were mutually unsympathetic and
indeed incompatible. As it was not his intention to resolve their dis-
agreements, the usual outcome was indecision which lost him political
devotion and intellectual respect. Nobody enjoyed his full confidence
except perhaps Arakcheev whose cramped political vision Alexander
came to share at the end of his reign. Though he was no ‘enigma’ —
because there was no unresolved purpose to discover — Alexander’s
friends in Russia, even before his rivals in Europe, justly called him
double-faced. In his politics he showed himself a cynical practitioner
although his principles and emotions were those of romantic liberalism,
evangelism or mysticism. In his private life, he was a neglectful, unfaithful
and complaisant husband who, by careful dissimulation, kept up appear-
ances and was even known as ‘our angel’ among his family.
The biographical approach to Alexander’s reign is not a mere con-
vention. Tolstoy decried but could not replace it. Soviet historians,
with all their valuable research into the economic and social conditions
of the reign, have been concerned to reveal the sporadic industrial or
agrarian conflict as a cumulative development and have failed to relate
it adequately to economic enterprise, still less to governmental policy.
It is Alexander’s individuality that probably explains the conservatives’
subsequent myth of an irresponsible stimulus to revolution side by side
with the liberal myth of Russia’s missed opportunity to enter the main
stream of western history. It was Alexander who for a time presided
over the growth of Russian patriotism, the sociology of which still
awaits analysis.
In the early days of the ‘unofficial committee’ the emperor approved
its secretary Stroganov’s record of his intentions. ‘Reform would
begin with the administration’ but the committee was apparently to
‘define the rights of man’ and draft a constitution. The constitution was
to check ‘arbitrary power’, and the rights of man were to be defined
as liberty, property (so long as it did ‘not hurt others’) and equality of
opportunity. No progress was ever made on these lines. Stroganov
and Kochubei, the radical and the conservative, were agreed that the
opposition of the emperor’s official advisers was too strong, the emperor
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too unsystematic. 1 Nonetheless, Alexander permitted his unofficial
committee to debate freely and Czartoryski claimed that there was
‘no useful reform during the reign which did not have its birth in these
conciliabula’.
This claim was not strictly true, for Alexander’s first administrative
reform, the institution of a ‘permanent council’, took place in April
1801 before the committee was yet in being. Paul, like his predecessors,
had used the ‘imperial council’ erratically and the object of the new
reform was to diminish rather than to magnify its significance. Its
function was limited to advice on legislation, and interest now focused
on the Senate. The ‘directing’ Senate, as it was called when its executive
rather than its more useful judicial functions were emphasised, nominally
supervised the colleges and other administrative boards. However,
the procurator-general of the Senate did not owe his authority to its
power, while the emperor had his own direct links with the colleges.
As office was not hereditary in Russia, the Senate was nominated largely
from retired generals or leading officials, and it possessed no definable
function, let alone rights. Although the oldest Russian institution, it
was merely the creation of Peter the Great, who had copied foreign
models. This did not prevent moderate conservatives from treating the
Senate as if it were entrenched in national history and they saw in it a
basis for political consolidation rather than reform. However, the
so-called ‘senatorial party’ lacked organisation and oligarchical spirit,
at any rate once the powerful personalities of Pahlen and Panin were
removed. Its spokesmen were on the left of the ‘party’, particularly
the Vorontsov brothers: Simeon, the ambassador in London, and
Alexander who, soon to be made imperial chancellor, was regarded by
the reformers as a bridge between their ‘unofficial committee’ and
officialdom. The Vorontsovs were behind the drafting of a so-called
‘charter to the Russian people’ for Alexander to promulgate at his
coronation in September 1801. Liberal and constitutionalist, com-
bining habeas corpus with the entrenchment of the Senate, this charter
was nonetheless rejected by the unofficial committee on the principle,
apparently, that the good is the enemy of the better.
The emperor invited the Senate to submit proposals for its future,
but before these were ready he issued his own decision on its function
of resolving legislation and executive action. This was interpreted by
the Senate as a right of remonstrance, and it now protested against a
decree that infringed the charter of 1762 by making nobles in non-
commissioned ranks liable to serve the twenty-one years usual for all
except officers. The protest, presented by Stroganov’s father, was
rejected with severity, and, ironically enough, another member of
the unofficial committee, Novosiltsev, was sent with the autocrat’s
1 Note of conversation 9 May 1801. Shilder, Aleksandr /, vol. n, p. 343.
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instructions that the Senate’s task was only to resolve the conflict of
existing laws. Yet despite this abject failure of the senatorial movement,
the idea of noble opposition, like the alternative myth of reform from
above, was long to exert a powerful political influence.
More successful than Alexander’s ambiguous definition of the
Senate’s rights was his simultaneous decree of 8/20 September 1802,
which abolished ‘colleges’ as departments of state and established
ministries in their place. This was the work of the unofficial committee,
its most lasting reform. Paul had already formed two such ministries —
commerce and crown lands — and now there were to be in addition
ministries of the interior, foreign affairs, justice, war, marine, finance
and education. Like the colleges, these were to report to the Senate but,
in practice, the Senate now acquired a new rival in the ‘committee of
ministers’ set up by this same decree. The committee of ministers was
attended regularly by Alexander until 1807 or 1808, and it was to
remain the major administrative institution until Nicholas I began to
divert its power to his personal chancery. The new minis tries were
generally resented by the political nobility which described them as
‘vizirates’ and Alexander’s ideal of government as ‘Turkish’. 1 Con-
servatives mourned the colleges, which like the Senate were the rela-
tively recent foreign innovations of Peter, as expressions of the national
genius. In reality, the nobility had only just grown into these in-
stitutions, although it is true that by chance they expressed a Russian
trait — preference for collective responsibility below the dictatorship
level— and that ‘colleges’ remained as organs within departments of
state up to and even after the October Revolution of 1917.
The ‘young flatterers’, as the members of the unofficial committee
were called by one senatorial critic, 2 were blamed for the reform as a
means of getting office. In fact Kochubei was already in charge of a
department of state, and the others took posts only as junior ministers.
The committee continued to meet and in 1803 achieved its second and
last success in legislation. This was an educational reform. The pro-
gramme of Catherine the Great’s decree of 1776, which was intended to
produce an expanding educational system at primary and secondary
level in all provinces, had come to a standstill, owing to financial
stringency and also to Russian rural conditions, lack of teachers and the
lack of text-books in. Russian. The new reform, which aimed at forty-
two gymnasia of grammar-school type and four hundred and five
other secondary schools, was hardly more successful, nor was the plan
for primary schools in every parish. Of a hundred schools recorded in
the Novgorod province in 1806, none were in existence two years later.
1 F. F. Vigel, Zapiski (Moscow, 1928), vol. 1, p. 298.
* Divov’s memorandum for the Emperor, in T. Schiemann, Geschichte Russlands utiter
Nikolaus I (Berlin, 1904), vol. 1, App. I.
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But the new national centralising of education into university districts
was promising and anticipated a Napoleonic reform in France on the
same lines. New universities were founded at Kazan and Kharkov, while
Czartoryski was put in charge of the university and schools of the Vilna
area in which Polish was to be the main language of education.
That no reform of serfdom was undertaken through the unofficial
committee was not entirely due to Alexander’s own sensitivity to out-
side opinion; the other members seem to have lost heart. Opposition
was due not only to property interests but also to social and economic
considerations. Although laisser-faire doctrines were gaining ground,
even such ardent devotees of Adam Smith as the anglophile
Mordvinov could not face the economic and social dislocation which
might be caused by a mobile landless agrarian proletariat. Speranskii
was to share these fears, and all that emerged from the revulsion of
Alexander and his friends against serfdom was a decree permitting
masters to emancipate their serfs through individual contract. By 1861
only some quarter of a million peasants and their dependents had bene-
fited from this measure. The idea of peasant reform was not dropped.
Even Arakcheev produced a scheme for emancipation, but the only posi-
tive measures came piecemeal in 1816 and 1817 when the German land-
lords in the Baltic provinces were permitted to imitate the landless
emancipation which had proved profitable in neighbouring Prussia.
There was not even a consistent attempt to ameliorate the established
system. Alexander forbade the advertisement of serfs for sale without
land and also the sale of serfs for the discharge of debt. But the penal
transportation of serfs by their masters without legal process was not
prohibited, although the question was raised in 1803 and again in 1811.
The right of crown bailiffs to transport state peasants was expressly
confirmed in 1822.
The unofficial committee, without being disbanded, faded away and
with it the impulse to domestic reform, less as a result of the ministerial
activity of its members than as a result of the emperor’s growing pre-
occupation with foreign and military affairs which the expansion of
Napoleonic France imposed. The theme which linked foreign affairs
with the emperor’s earlier liberal aspirations was the Polish question,
and this was emphasised when in 1804 he made the Pole Czartoryski
Russian foreign minister on the retirement of A. Vorontsov. Since the
last partition of Poland in 1795 the greater part of the heart of the
country with the capital Warsaw had been incorporated in Prussia. The
Russian frontier did not run far west of what was to be the Curzon line
of 1919, that is the projected ethnic frontier, or the 1945 frontier, except
that what is now part of the Soviet Ukraine was then Austrian Galicia.
Prussia was therefore the main enemy of the Poles, some of whom, such
as Czartoryski, looked to Alexander’s Russia for aid, others to France.
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A Polish legion had even been formed to fight in the French republican
armies. Czartoryski’s position became increasingly delicate when
Alexander revealed a growing sympathy for Prussia as the result of his
visit to Memel and of his romantic friendship with Queen Luise.
Nonetheless, Alexander insisted that Czartoryski should accept the post
of foreign minister, and the latter hoped that Prussian neutrality in the
War of the Third Coalition would benefit Poland: it was his enemy,
Dolgorukov, who obtained Prussian concessions favourable to the
Russian and Austrian allies on their way to defeat at Austerlitz. In
the wake of Prussian collapse at Jena, Czartoryski proposed in vain that
Alexander should proclaim himself King of Poland and so forestall
Napoleon. After Friedland it was too late. During the era of Tilsit,
Russian patronage seemed hopeless to the Poles, but an outspoken
correspondence continued between Alexander and Czartoryski and,
when in 1813 the Russian emperor emerged as the arbiter of Poland’s
fate, it was to his Polish friend that he turned for guidance.
The capitulation of Tilsit was regarded by almost all political opinion
in Russia as an affront to the national honour. The diplomatic and
economic dictation of France which followed was so obvious that people
tended to ascribe acts of policy in other fields to French influence, to
obedience, to sympathy or even to imitation. The war of 1808 against
Sweden was rightly attributed to French temptation and pressure:
patriotic officers avoided service in this and the still more unjust struggle
with Finnish national resistance which followed. Then, as regards
domestic policy, the imputation of cosmopolitan, indeed French,
example was to reinforce the self-interest of the nobility in resisting the
next set of Alexander’s experiments in reform. The emperor’s agent in
these experiments, indeed for the most part their originator, was M.
Speranskii (1772-1839), the son of a priest who was himself educated in
the theological seminary at St Petersburg, and whose distinction in the
ministry of the interior brought him to the Emperor Alexander’s notice
in 1807. As a force in Russian history Speranskii has probably been over-
rated. It is true that he became a kind of one-man commission, reporting
on and planning solutions for the widest range of immediate as well as
fundamental problems outside the areas of war and diplomacy. But
neither the quality of his voluminous papers nor his precarious authority
as the emperor’s virtual chef de cabinet, without social influence or
even the highest official dignity, suggest that he brought Russia very
near to a liberal revolution. His most comprehensive work, the draft
constitution of 1809, was, like that prepared by Novosiltsev in 1819,
never promulgated, and despite its eloquent exposition of civil rights
it was silent about the emancipation of the serfs. This inconsistency was
typical of Speranskii the bureaucratic thinker, who always balanced his
western ideas against the realities of Russian history and society. He
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was a disciple of laisser-faire doctrine who recommended the protection
of infant industry ; a liberal who recommended the retention of serfdom
in the early stages of reform.
Speranskii’s ascendancy in Alexander’s counsels followed his return
from the meeting of the two emperors at Erfurt in 1808, where he
impressed Napoleon as ‘the only clear head in Russia’. In that year he
was made responsible for the reform of ecclesiastical education and the
codification of Russian law. It was in 1809 that he drafted the two
decrees which did so much to make him disliked as a reformer then and
praised since. The one, the ‘ kammerherr' decree, attacked titular
court appointments held without duties, the other made promotion in
the higher grades of the civil service dependent on examination or
university qualification. The decrees were not enforced owing to bitter
opposition, but they made Speranskii appear as a committed antagonist
of the nobility, which he was not.
In the same year he laid before Alexander his major legislative pro-
ject, the abortive plan for a constitution. It was an imitation of the
French consular constitution of 1799 and its influence on Russian
administration proved negligible. The autocracy was to rest supreme
upon three pillars, the executive, the judicial, the legislative or repre-
sentative. These were to be formed in layers from the level of the
volost (a cantonal aggregation of villages) to that of a provincial
government, and then to culminate at the centre in the ministries co-
operating with the directing senate as the executive, the judicial senate
as the supreme and appeal court, and the duma, or assembly, as the
representative legislature. All three powers were to be directly subject
to the emperor but also to some extent subordinate to the emperor’s
supreme council which was to advise him. Out of all this integrated
plan, the only proposal to be implemented was the reconstruction of
the state council. Speranskii became its secretary and Rumyantsev its
president and chancellor of the Empire. For a time the new model
council seems to have gained in authority, with the emperor’s attendance,
but the rival institutions of the senate, the ministerial committee and
the ministries themselves, soon regained their primacy in practice.
Indeed Speranskii’s reorganisation in 1811 of the individual ministries,
which now included one for police and one for foreign religious
cults, was in fact his most lasting work; the pattern lasted until the
abortive revolution of 1905.
Meanwhile Speranskii had been called upon to prepare financial and
legal reforms. Both his resulting plans were failures. The financial
problem was one of budget deficits associated with currency inflation.
Unrest throughout Europe had proved expensive, for the Tilsit system
did not promise security while the war against Turkey and the con-
tinental blockade were alike exhausting national resources. The value
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of the paper rouble ( assignat ) had declined from 67 per cent of the silver
rouble in 1806 to 25 per cent in 1810. Of Speranskii’s remedies the
stoppage of the issue of assignats could not be maintained, the receipts
from his domestic loan and his sale of unoccupied public domain were
disappointing, the yield of the turnover tax and the temporary and
self-assessed land-tax were trifling compared to the resentment they
aroused; and, as usual in Russia, only the extra burdens on the peasant
of an increased poll tax and vodka monopoly profit were fiscal successes.
Speranskii’s reputation gained still less from his first attempt to codify
the Russian law. His draft was accepted by the state council in 1812,
in spite of its Napoleonic inspiration, but it too was never promulgated.
His triumph over the jungle of Russian law was yet to come with his
great collation, index and digest in the next reign.
For conservative or perhaps merely patriotically sensitive Russians,
Speranskii’s actual and projected reforms, alleged to be French in
inspiration, were an aspect of the Tilsit system. It was this that brought
him down, as much as high-level intrigue, indiscretion or the personal
disloyalty of which the tsar accused him . Already in 1811 Karamzin’s
famous paper on Ancient and Modern Russia represented this reaction.
It was written for Alexander’s sister the Grand Duchess Catherine, and
it was almost certainly seen by him. 1 Speranskii was the unnamed
opponent, but he was rightly seen as continuing policies which
Karamzin chided the emperor for patronising from the start of his reign.
Karamzin idealised Catherine’s absolutism and wanted to preserve and
consolidate the governmental institutions of her era. At the same time,
he renounced the foreign adventures which had glorified her reign and
preached isolationism. His real grievance was the bureaucratisation of
government which Speranskii typified; but, so long as Russia was
divided between the functionless cosmopolitan nobility and the back-
ward agrarian masses, more than half of them enslaved, Karamzin and
his kind had no viable alternative to offer. The growing antipathy in
Russian society to the French connexion demanded a sacrifice, and it is
clear that Russian political opinion received as such the dismissal, arrest
and banishment of Speranskii in March 1812. By then war was widely
seen in Europe as inevitable, both sides were building up their armies
and the Russians were snatching the first chance of a victorious ending
to their Turkish war to release troops for a western front. It was
indicative of Russia’s comparative economic advancement that the
immediate grounds for war were not so much ideological or even
strategic as commercial. In a letter to Czartoryski of April 1812,
Alexander complained that Napoleon was demanding the interruption
of ‘all trade with neutrals’ and free entry for the ‘French luxury pro-
1 N. M. Karamzin, Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia, ed. R. Pipes (Cambridge,
Mass., 1959).
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ducts which we have prohibited because we are not able to pay for
them’. He concluded: ‘As I cannot consent to such proposals, war
will follow ’. 1 Till the last moment the Russians were to speak the
mustering invader fair, offering negotiations for a compromise even
after the Russian frontiers had been crossed. And by then the con-
fusion of nationality and liberty was so complete in the mind of the
liberal emperor turned Russian patriot that he could write to the British
prince regent of the defence of the serf-bound empire as ‘the last
struggle ... of liberal ideas against the system of tyranny’.
Invasion intensified nationality class by class, without consolidating
the nation. In the short campaign there was no unity either of experi-
ence or of confidence. The strategy of withdrawal was sophisticated
and was well summarised at the outset by Rostopchin, who did much to
maintain the morale of Moscow as its governor until the last moment.
‘The Tsar will always be formidable in Moscow, fearsome in Kazan, in-
vincible in Tobolsk.’ The emperor’s intention to command in the field was
ill-received; when he left the army for St Petersburg, however, this was
seen as dereliction of duty. For Moscow was the sentimental capital of
Russia as well as Napoleon’s obvious objective, and when the tsar
visited it after the fall of Smolensk he won a brief popularity. At
meetings which he summoned, the provincial nobility offered three
million roubles and eighty thousand recruits, the townsmen ten millions
in cash. Even the sardonic Rostopchin records that ‘the Russian man
for once . . . forgot that he was only a churl and roused himself at the
thought that he was threatened by a foreign yoke’. Alexander shared
his first commanding general Barclay de Tolly’s doctrine of with-
drawal but the protests of subordinate generals and public indignation
forced him to replace Barclay by the elderly and tardy victor in the
Turkish war, Kutuzov. The latter’s reluctant stand at Borodino, which
was to be for posterity the great battle honour of the war, did not alter
the balance of forces, and Kutuzov abandoned Moscow. Probably less
than a fifth of the population of about a quarter of a million stayed
behind, but not, however, to fight; the prisons had been opened and
many were down-and-outs. The burning was almost certainly
Rostopchin’s doing; it was an operational decision which denied
Napoleon winter quarters with the hope of reinforcement.
The calamity of Moscow was received by public opinion as a humilia-
tion and the emperor was accused in some quarters of betrayal. Yet
those who suspected Alexander of vacillation or worse were probably
unjust. Alexander reprimanded Kutuzov for even passing on Napoleon’s
offer of terms, and publicly declared ‘I would go and eat potatoes with
the last of my peasants rather than ratify the shame of my fatherland’.
1 Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich, L'Empereur Alexandre I (St Petersburg, 1912),
vol. 1, Appendix., p. 363.
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Once the retreat began on 7/19 October, the outcome was a foregone
conclusion, even if Kutuzov’s inglorious methods of pursuit damped
patriotic elation. The Russian regulars suffered enormous casualties, for
they were hardly more used than the French to fighting in the winter.
The partisans, often led by regulars like Denisov in War and Peace,
acted a heroic part, but their numbers are not known.
With the victorious counter-offensive came a sense of pride and
expectancy among the Russian public far below the level of literacy. The
soldiers, praised by the emperor as the liberators of Europe, expected
social rewards on their return; and in other classes too there were those
who felt that the Russian state and throne would never more easily
digest reform. But Alexander, the free-thinking liberal, had turned into
an evangelical conservative. It was the burning of Moscow, he said
afterwards, that had ‘enlightened his soul’. In December 1812, he
founded the Russian Bible Society on the British model; and then with
Golitsyn, the head of the Holy Synod, and with Koshelev, another
converted courtier, he formed a kind of devotional trio guided by a
pseudo-masonic rigmarole which was gradually absorbed into the
orthodoxy of the emperor’s last religious phase. Even more than
hitherto, Alexander was to behave as a split personality. A tough
dynastic politician, he negotiated on equal terms with Mettemich,
Talleyrand or Castlereagh. But in time spared from diplomacy and
pleasure he would wallow in the praise of such enthusiasts as Baroness
Krudener or relax in the utopian internationalism of German moralists
like Jung-Stilling and Baader. The tangible outcome of this mood was
the Holy Alliance treaty, the text of which was prescribed in an imperial
manifesto to be read in the churches.
The disappointment of the Russian public’s hopes was made more
bitter by the concessions which the emperor was ready to make to the
Poles. Russian opinion did not grudge Finland the rights remaining
to it after its annexation in 1809 — its impotent Council of Notables in
Helsingfors or the infrequent assemblies of its almost purely ceremonial
Diet — but then the Finns unlike the Poles were not traditional enemies
who had assisted Napoleon to lay waste Russian lands. However,
Napoleon’s Duchy of Warsaw was delivered to Russia almost intact at
Vienna, and for Alexander the grant of a constitution to Poland was,
understandably enough, the token discharge of one youthful commit-
ment — perhaps, as the Russians might feel, relieving him from the
pressure of others. The Polish state was to be indissolubly linked with
Russia through personal union of the crowns. Although Czartoryski
had helped to draft the constitution and had headed the provisional
government, it was Zajaczek, a veteran of the Polish resistance against
Russia in the 1790’s, who became first viceroy. Alexander’s brother
Constantine became commander-in-chief of Poland’s independent
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army and Novosiltsev a kind of supervising high commissioner. The
constitution itself was as politically liberal as any in Europe. There was
a Diet (sejm) of two houses, although the form of representation reserved
even the lower one very largely to the nobility. Ministers were
nominally responsible to the sejm, which could petition the viceroy to
initiate legislation and which could, and did, postpone measures laid
before it. Religion was to be Catholic; the official language, Polish;
and every official a Pole; but the Polish peasant, like the Russian,
remained a serf.
The constitution of ‘Congress Poland’ established at Vienna,
laboured in action but did not break down, and Alexander’s personal
appearances over the years before the sejm were deservedly successful.
Trouble lay in national antipathy. A cycle of patriotic student move-
ments followed by repressions led to friction between Czartorysld, the
curator of Polish education, and Novosiltsev. More serious were
patriotic conspiracies, involving army officers and associating Poles
under Russian and Prussian sovereignty, though on a small scale. The
liaison of other groups with the Russian conspirators — the future
Decembrists — came to nothing, but the plots in the army produced
their martyrs and maintained a continuity of resistance up to the great
outbreak of 1831. On the Russian side there was jealousy of Polish
civil rights, stimulated when Alexander used the occasion of opening
the sejm in 18x8 to represent the Polish constitution as an experiment
which he would extend to Russia. Again, Alexander was suspected with
some reason of an intention, never realised, to make a greater Poland
by detaching Lithuanian provinces to it, just as he had detached to the
new Finland the Finnish provinces won by Peter the Great from
Sweden a century earlier. In general, the emperor’s supposed preference
for Baltic Germans and foreigners aggravated a long-standing grievance
against the dynasty. Yet there was no truth in the allegation that
Alexander ‘hated Russians’. It was merely that he preferred to be
advised by many individuals with disparate, even conflicting, views
rather than by a close-knit, single-minded staff.
On Alexander’s return to Russia Arakcheev became his closest
political assistant, although he had played no part in the peace settle-
ment. His authority and responsibility thenceforward has been
magnified by the animosity of contemporaries so as to become a
convention of Russian historiography. Incorrupt, brutal and reserved,
he was detested by the court nobility as a parvenu bully and by liberals
as a vindictive reactionary. But there is no evidence that he influenced
Alexander even outside the military and diplomatic affairs which the
emperor controlled in detail himself; he was simply used by Alexander
and became increasingly his intermediary with his ministers.
The historical symbol of Alexander’s collaboration with Arakcheev
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was the institution of military colonies. The Austro-Hungarian settle-
ments on the Turkish frontier seem to have provided the example, but
any Russian administrator must have had the Cossack communities
in mind. The advantages of integrating regiments with villages of state
peasants were set out in a defence by Speranskii in 1821. They would
simplify the peasants’ fiscal obligations, remove the burden of billeting,
keep families together, provide labour for agriculture and secure the
livelihood of veterans. The system did not so work out. The first
experiment, involving a disastrous deportation of peasants, was a total
failure. Then in 1817 began the amalgamation of army units with
existing villages, an enterprise which at its peak involved nearly a
million Russians of all ages and sexes. The villagers were subject to a
military discipline that at one point even enforced annual child-bearing
by fines, while the troops were liable to field labour in addition to drill
and often became as embittered as the peasants. A revolt at Chuguev
in 1819 had to be suppressed, a task carried through by Arakcheev with
exemplary brutality. Yet Alexander retained his interest in the colonies
and in the last year of his life was proposing new ones as well as improve-
ment through the suppression of vodka-shops. The colonies were widely
condemned, however, and declined during the reign of Alexander’s
less doctrinaire and utopian successor.
The military colonies were a parody of the kind of political reform
which the paternal absolutism of the Holy Alliance seemed to promise.
There were no other reforms, and the emperor’s religion became in-
creasingly clerical and sterile. Symptomatic was the decision of 1816
that Golitsyn combine the office of procurator of the Holy Synod with
that of minister of education, and in 1818 Golitsyn issued an educational
instruction which presaged a whole era of Russian obscurantism. That
priority among the sciences should go to applied mathematics and that
the greater glory of the nation be the prime aim of the humanities —
these were common-places of educational thought in Peter’s Russia as
in many other eighteenth-century European states. Less normal, how-
ever, was Golitsyn’s insistence that scientific teaching should eliminate
‘vain and useless speculation about the origin and evolution of the
earth’. Even more remarkable was the appointment of two notorious
bureaucratic adventurers, Runich and Magnitskii, as curators at St
Petersburg and Kazan Universities. Such aberrations were to exasperate
the aristocratic intelligentsia and to act as a precedent for the more
secular-minded repressions of Nicholas.
Seeing as he did the military establishment as a basis of general
order, indeed of the national ethos, the emperor’s political confidence
was most profoundly shocked by the mutiny in 1820 of the Semenov
guard, one of the three household infantry regiments. The affair was
attributed by Russians to the misconduct of the Baltic German colonel.
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It marked the rift between the two ethnic elements in the officer corps:
political disaffection was its result rather than its cause, when numbers of
all ranks were re-posted to less distinguished units in some of which the
future Decembrists worked on their resentment. Still, there had been
agitation from outside, and this fact moved Alexander to regroup his
political and religious defences against the ‘empire of evil’. He had
come to confuse nationalism with revolutionary liberalism and in 1822
he dismissed his Greek-minded foreign minister, Capodistrias. To
Chateaubriand Alexander explained that he had seen the ‘sign of
Revolution’ over the Peloponnese. At the same time, he was moving
into his last phase of more sacerdotal religion, largely under the in-
fluence of the archimandrite Photius, a highly political priest and an
associate of Arakcheev. These two were responsible for the dis-
solution in 1822 of all secret and quasi-religious societies (except the
Bible Society, the emperor’s own creation), and for the dismissal from
office of his two oldest friends, Volkonskii and Golitsyn.
But in spite of his growing accommodation to the contemporary
monarchical principle of union of throne and altar, Alexander kept a
rearguard of his mind in the camp — or rather abandoned camp-site —
of reform. He seems to have known since 1816 of the seditious political
groups which were forming among officers and other young nobles and
were to culminate in the Decembrist mutiny. Yet he is said to have
met evidence of the developing conspiracy by telling General Vasil-
chikov: ‘I used to encourage such errors; it is not for me to be harsh’.
And even as late as 1819 Alexander could commission Novosiltsev to
draft a constitution. The result was somewhat less liberal than Speran-
skii’s plan of ten years earlier and was remarkable mainly for a quasi-
federal system of grouped provinces. Such delegation of powers was
actually tried out on the administrative level in one region while the
constitution as a whole was left pending. Again, the emperor was
still toying with the idea of abolishing serfdom, and he not only had
Arakcheev draw up plans for emancipation but also considered a scheme
submitted by N. Turgeniev, the author of the influential Theory of
Taxation.
It was not incongruous that in the same year Turgeniev should have
joined a leading revolutionary society whose aristocratic members were
mostly opportunist reformers as undecided in their ideology as in their
strategy. The society was one of a succession of such groups which
originated among the guards officers of the capital in 1816 and culmi-
nated in the united northern and southern societies responsible for the
Decembrist revolt. The movement undoubtedly reflected the same
contemporary taste for secret societies as did Russian freemasonry and
the emperor’s own private religious groups. It included members of two
of the most famous Russian families, Trubetskois and Obolenskis.
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Ryleev, the poet, was a member, and although Pushkin was not
formally committed his politically mutinous poetry heartened the
plotters.
Inspiring the movement seems to have been the fact that, as one
Decembrist put it, ‘ all ranks from general to private ’ had been impressed
during the war by what they had seen of freedom and progress in Europe.
The criticism by one of the leaders, Bestuzhev, of conditions in Russia
was representative of the right wing of the movement. He denounced
the suppression of free speech, internal espionage, the restrictions on
education, the corruption of justice and administration, the oppression
of peasants by officials, the waste by the latter of manpower and
material, the liquor monopoly and other supposed fiscal errors, the
neglect of the industrial class, the illiteracy of the clergy, the futility or
viciousness of the nobility except for its best element in the army and
bureaucracy — an element which conditions discouraged. The right
wing, roughly coinciding with the northern society, sponsored a draft
constitution prepared by Nikita Muraviev. The inspiration of this was
American federalist, hardly a creative reaction to Russian conditions,
although Muraviev would have asserted Russian independence from
Europe in placing a new capital on the Volga. Peasants were to be
legally free but landless, and so would miss political rights linked with
property. The emperor was to be retained as ‘supreme executive’, but
this derogation from republicanism was made, it seems, in the hope of
bloodless revolution. Far more historically suggestive, although not in
fact influential owing to the suppression of its text, was the left wing’s
leading document. This was composed by Paul Pestel, a young regi-
mental colonel and son of the notorious absentee governor of Siberia.
Called Russkaya Pravda after the oldest Russian legislative monument,
it showed in fact less historicist than proto-fascist character. Universal
suffrage and yearly direct elections gave a pseudo-democratic frame-
work, but the complete russification of an expanding empire, with the
Poles freed on conditions and the Jews deported, the express provision
of political police, the prohibition of political parties, the assimilation of
the clergy to a ‘ branch of the administration ’ — all these are in the line
of Russian social absolutism. He even showed a premonition of
Marxism when he discerned in Russia a rising ‘aristocracy of wealth
which is far more pernicious than the feudal aristocracy’.
Some members of both societies had screwed themselves up to the
classical Russian resource of assassinating the tsar. But the chance, as
they saw it, of a transfer of power came instead with the death of
Alexander on i December 1825 (N.S.). By then the imminence of action
by the conspirators had been revealed to Alexander himself, but
Arakcheev, overwhelmed by a domestic tragedy, had taken no counter-
measures. So the conspirators were able to take advantage of the three
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weeks’ interregnum which followed Alexander’s death. This inter-
regnum was due to his secrecy in nominating his successor. The heir
apparent, Constantine, had resigned his claims after marrying a Polish
commoner, and in 1823 Alexander had provisionally nominated his
younger brother Nicholas, depositing his instructions to that effect with
the highest civil and ecclesiastical institutions. However, when news of
his death reached the capital, nobody dared to act in execution of these
dispositions. The grand-duke Nicholas had no pre-arrangement with
Constantine and so to be on the safe side he proclaimed the latter.
Constantine, however, disavowed this step and would not leave War-
saw. Finally, Nicholas decided that he should himself be proclaimed and
the troops, already sworn to Constantine, resworn. This the ‘young
colonels’ of the northern society saw as their opportunity, and on
14/26 December these ‘Decembrists’ brought their guardsmen on to the
emperor’s parade in the Admiralty square to mutiny. There they and
the loyal troops faced each other futilely with hardly a shot fired
(except to kill the parleying military governor of the capital) until
Nicholas brought on guns to clear the square with round shot. It may
have been nearer touch and go than it looks, crowds of onlookers were
on the insurgents’ side, the slightest wavering by the loyal troops could
be expected to win the day for the Decembrists. On the other hand the
independent mutiny by the southern radicals which followed was a for-
lorn hope, easily suppressed, so the influence of the abortive coup
remained only to poison Russian history.
The Decembrist revolt had not been predominantly libertarian in
impulse or programme. Rather was it analogous to the twentieth-
century revolts of military intelligentsias on the fringes of Western
society. The appeal for national regeneration leaned towards democratic
forms and to an extension of civil rights not so much for the sake of
natural justice as in deference to ruling theories of economic and social
efficiency. In the protest against public vices the general grievance was
fundamentally the stagnation of Russia. This grievance was justified
according to most European standards of fife, of public morality and
development. But not by all — even if one neglects the question (as the
greatest of Russian intellectuals, Pushkin, did not) whether the daily lot
and human dignity of a Russian serf was inferior to that of an English
mill hand. For there were contemporary pilot achievements, from the
literary triumph of Pushkin at one extreme, to the success of the
Alexandrov machine and textile factory in St Petersburg at the other,
which illustrate the perennial disparities in Russian progress. Then
there was the unsurpassed military and diplomatic eminence which
Russia had won in competition with the West. This the Decembrists
were disposed to take for granted, all the more since they knew as
soldiers how much the national glory was owed to the conscripted man-
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power of serfdom which they regretted, drilled by the German methods
which they hated.
In fact Catherine the Great’s empire had been consolidated in
prestige rather than extended in territory in the last quarter of a century.
In Europe, apart from the spreading of tsarist sovereignty over Finland
and inner Poland, Russia had gained only Bessarabia — under the treaty
of Bucharest with Turkey in 1812. In Asia the Emperor Paul’s pro-
tectorate over Georgia had been replaced by annexation in 1801. The
resulting encirclement by Russian jurisdiction of the martial tribes of
the Caucasus provoked the beginnings of a guerrilla war which was to
develop in the next reign into a great resistance campaign tying up the
Russian army for a quarter of a century. South of Georgia sporadic
warfare with Persia as well as Turkey during the Tilsit era brought
Russia most of the petty khanates up to the Araxes frontier east of
Nakhichevan and including Baku. Under the peace treaty of Gulistan
of 1813 Russia obtained, moreover, control of the Caspian and a com-
mercial position which the Treaty of Turkmanchai in 1828 was to
amplify into a century-long economic and political domination of
northern Persia. Within the Asian frontiers of the empire Siberia began
an administrative revolution as a result of the ‘revision’ carried out by
Speranskii. He was sent out as governor-general and inspector from
1819 to 1822 as a mark of both continued trust and continued dis-
pleasure, and his recommendations were incorporated in three decrees
of 1822 which were to control Siberian destinies until 1917.
At the same time the conventional signs of economic growth were
present in Russia and officially recorded. 1 Although classifications of
factory labour are arbitrary, considering the overlap of rural estate
workshops using serfs as well as of domestic industry, the figures are
relatively significant. 2 In manufacturing (factory) industry, i.e. exclud-
ing mining and metallurgy, employment rose from about 100,000 in
1804 (82,000 in 1799) to some 210,000 in 1825. The expansion was
mainly in textiles which accounted for 75 per cent of factory workers in
1814. Employment in cotton manufacture grew from 8000 in 1804 to
76,000 in 1830, in woollens from 29,000 to 67,000 and in linens (which
had nothing to gain from the cessation of imports during the continental
blockade) from 24,000 to only 27,000. Just as the temporary exclusion
of textile imports from England boosted the infant domestic industry,
so did the frustration of iron and copper exports to England depress the
mining and metallurgical industries. With the permanent loss of the
1 E.g. The reports of the Ministries of Interior and Finance between 1804 and 1822
noted by Khromov, Ekonomicheskoe razvitie, p. 49, note 1, and various issues of the
Journal of Trade and Manufactures.
% A recent revision is noted by J. Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia (Princeton, 1961),
pp. 323-4. Lenin’s criticism in Development of Capitalism in Russia (Moscow, 1956),
pp. 496 ff. applies to a later date.
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English market, employment at about 120,000 hardly varied during the
period.
Cotton was in all ways the most advanced industry. The proportion
of freely-hired labour was highest (95 per cent in 1825), compared with a
general average of about 50 per cent, although much of it consisted
of peasants who were serfs but let out on obrok (p. 496) particularly in
the Russian Manchester, Ivanovo, where some of the employers as well
as most of the employees seem to have been the Sheremetiev family’s
serfs. Cotton too was most highly mechanised; in 1828 ni ne mills had
30,000 spindles between them. The Alexandrov factory at St Peters-
burg, with its 4000 employees, had imported English machinery in the
1790’s, it introduced steam in 1805, and in 1825 used 170 out of a total
national figure of some 2000 h.p. The Journal of Trade and Manu-
factures claimed in 1828 that Alexandrov ‘could no doubt take its place
beside the finest English factories of its kind’, 1 and such pride in national
industry was not exceptional. There was some influential opposition to
industrialisation from archaising nationalists and commodity producers
who feared the mobilisation of labour. But they faced admonitions
such as those of the author of The Russian — a complete manufacturer
and factory owner: ‘Are the English lords, the English nobility less
genteel than you? But they engage in trade ’ 2
Official policy was progressive; for instance the influential Mordvinov
maintained that agriculture depended on an expanding industry for
its advancement. There was nothing like Metternich’s fear of industry
raising a bourgeois class with new social and political values. The
government founded a commercial bank, though the Russian credit
bank (accepting serfs as security) remained the preserve of the nobility;
it engaged in industrial propaganda, it sponsored manufacturing and
commercial associations, founded institutes of technical and commercial
education, established all-Russian exhibitions of manufactures, and
sponsored the imperial agricultural society of 1818 as a worthy rein-
forcement of Catherine the Great’s ‘free’ economic society of 1765.
But where there was most scope for government control, in foreign
trade and state revenue, expansion was not striking. The government
was perhaps too concerned by the depreciation of the assignat which
stood at 20 per cent of the silver rouble in 1814 and remained steady at
approximately 25 per cent from 1816 until 1840 when the rouble was
formally re-stabilised. Allowing for the fluctuation, budget revenue
varied little from 1807 to the 1830’s (Rs. 419 million in 1829) in spite of
war, relying as it did largely on the peasants’ contributions through poll
tax and vodka sales. Foreign trade turnover, with (as a rule) a large
1 Khromov, op. cit., p. 52, note 1.
* From a German book, published in Moscow (1812), cited by V. Gitermann, Geschichte
Russlands, 3 vols. (Zurich, 1944-9), vol. 11, App. p. 528.
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apparent balance in favour, rose on a three-year average by about a
quarter (Rs. 307 million in 1814 and 384 million in 1826) during the
same period; the very liberal tariff of 1819 was followed by the only
apparent deficit years, and the highly protective reaction of 1822 by the
intended re-adjustment.
Economic advances in the first quarter of the century, which of
course only scratched the agrarian face of Russia, left the national
demography virtually unchanged. The slump in ferrous mining and
foundries led to the release of most of the ascribed ( pripisnye ) labour in
1807, but these workers reverted to their local state-peasant status and
did not migrate. In progressive areas such as Moscow province, the
mobility which eighteenth-century economists predicted began to show
itself; a large increase in day labour was noted, both industrial and
agricultural, and a high proportion of urban labour was registered as
‘peasant’ (40 per cent in Moscow in the 1830’s). The incidence of
strikes and factory riots increased proportionately to employment, and
these have been religiously investigated by Soviet historians — as have the
peasant mutinies which were almost invariably local in cause and
occurrence. The plausible conclusion is that both phenomena were
generically similar while the worker was, as Lenin wrote, ‘getting the
worst of capitalism and of the inadequate development of capitalism’.
They belong in fact to agrarian history according to the Marxist scheme
rather than to the prehistory of the proletariat. It is significant that the
problem of industrial labour played a negligible part in the Decembrist
ideology. The revolutionary and reforming intelligentsia had nothing
to do with working-class agitation for another two generations, pre-
occupied as they were by the serfdom of the Russian masses contrasting
with their own westernisation to make their cultural schizophrenia
unbearable.
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CHAPTER XIX
THE NEAR EAST AND THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE,
1798-1830
T he ‘Near East’ is a term sometimes used to denote only the
Islamic lands between the Mediterranean and the variously
defined countries of the ‘ Middle East In this chapter it is used to
cover all the coastlands of the eastern Mediterranean — roughly, what
was known, a century and a half ago, as the Levant; and any survey of
changes in European relations with these lands must include some
reference to other parts of the Ottoman Empire and its immediate neigh-
bours in Asia. The fortunes of this decaying but still tough-cored
Empire were so closely li nked in every part that it is difficult to separate
the affairs of Egypt sharply from those of Greece, the Balkans and the
lower Danube, or from those of Turkey in Asia. Penetrating all these
regions were the commercial and strategical activities of the European
powers — of the French and English mainly through maritime interests
in the Mediterranean, of the Austrians and Russians chiefly on the
landward fringes of Turkey, but with many overlapping contacts and
rivalries in each direction. Finally, arising out of this penetration
(perhaps even inspiring some of it) and in turn accelerating it, was the
influence, both dissolving and reviving, of the technique, habits and
ideas of contemporary Europeans upon the older ways of life throughout
the Near East.
In this gradual process, the differences between the nations of Europe
were much less important, in relation to Islam, than were their
similarities. In spite of their rivalries or open enmities, the embassies at
Constantinople had more in common with each other than with the
intricate maze of officials at the Porte; the western consuls and
merchants, there and at Smyrna, were still all ‘Franks’ in the eyes of
Turkish pashas and even of Greek and Armenian traders; to the
Mameluke beys of Egypt around 1800, the French and British armies
were simply alternative brands of the same totally foreign medicine.
The year 1827 was to see the spectacle of British, French and Russian
warships sailing together into the Bay of Navarino, to challenge and
destroy, without war, a Turco-Egyptian fleet anchored in passive
defence under half-hearted commanders with some European technical
advisers. In spite of the cross-currents, this spectacle was a truer
mirror of the age than, say, the joint Russo-Turkish protectorate over
the Ionian Islands in 1800 or the alignments of the Crimean War half
a century later. Navarino (p. 549) was politically a paradox, but
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symbolically a pointer to the drift of the tide in the first half of the
nineteenth century. The details of political and commercial conflicts
among the powers should not obscure the common element in the
impact of Europe on the Near East. Politically, the powers were more
hostile to each other than to Islam; but, in a deeper and more lasting
sense, their combined activities produced a slow revolution which led
these regions, much later, to react against the political dominance of
Europe from Algiers to Afghanistan, from Constantinople (now
Istanbul) to Khartum, and to do so by methods and on principles
partly borrowed from those of Europe.
Next, it is well to remember that very few people in Europe knew
much about the Near East, and that still fewer ever visited those
countries. Up to 1789, books about Turkey mostly describe a strange
world, open perhaps to possible attack and liable to internal decay, but
static, self-contained and not very sensitive to external influences. Dur-
ing and after the Napoleonic wars, similar books reflect a more con-
fidently intrusive tone, treating Turkey as one more theatre of European
war and diplomacy, as a world in which positive winds of change are
blowing not only from outside but from within (Selim III, Mahmud II
and Muhammad Ali). The old anecdotal descriptions persist, but mixed
with more military, political and commercial speculation. In the period
up to about 1830, before the age of the steamship, the railway and the
telegraph, travellers for curiosity and pleasure were few, and often
romantically inclined; diplomatists and military or naval men usually
depended on interpreters for their understanding of people and events.
Despatches, and news of all sorts, penetrated but slowly in each
direction; news was often distorted on the way, and instructions or
reports might be overtaken by events before any decisions on them
could become effective.
It would be hard to exaggerate the long-term effects of the wars in
unsettling and reshaping the Near East. It had long been common in
Europe to talk about the decay of the Ottoman Empire, and chanceries
were full of schemes for partitioning it — some more and some less
chimerical; but these were mostly schemes for the simple annexation of
provinces, with little or no idea that their way of life need be transformed
or that their inhabitants, or even their local governments, might play a
significant part or develop ideas of their own about their future. The
literary and educational revival among prosperous Greeks (pp. 545-6)
had at first no defined political aims and no reflection among the people,
save perhaps in a vague hope that the Orthodox Church might some day
replace the Crescent by the Cross on the domes of the mosque which had
once been the great church of St Sophia at Constantinople. Perhaps that
might come about by the agency of Orthodox Russia if she chose; but
the main interest of Russia was necessarily in the Turkish provinces
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next to her own forward-creeping frontier — Armenia in Asia, and in
Europe the Danubian (hardly yet ‘Roumanian’) Principalities and the
Roumelian (hardly yet ‘Bulgarian’) region lying north and south of the
Balkan mountain range. These provinces all touched the Black Sea;
the Russians had gained control in the 1780’s over its northern shores
between the Kuban and the Dniester rivers and twenty years later, with
the conquest of the Caucasus, over most of its eastern shores too. The
new port of Odessa, founded by 1796, grew rapidly under the effective
governorship (1803-14) of the emigre Due de Richelieu (soon to be
Louis XVIII’s minister), who managed to keep its trade with Turkey
prospering through most of the Russo-Turkish war (1806-12). By
1814, Odessa had a cosmopolitan population of 40,000, and the Black
Sea coastlands, of which he was also governor, had been colonised by
equally mixed groups of Russians, Germans, Bulgars, Greeks and
Jews. 1 But much of the trade of these regions was carried on under
neutral flags during the wars, and Russian naval power in the Black
Sea was relatively in its infancy for many years to come.
Islam and the West understood each other very little. Moslems every-
where, like Christians, were linked by their faith, despite sectarian
differences. For the Turks until very lately, as for the Arabs long
ago, this had still been the faith of warriors dedicated to expanding its
frontiers. The faith and its moral code, enshrined in the Koran and
the Sacred Law {Shariah) were interpreted by the doctors of the law
( Ulemas ) under the Sheikh-ul-Islam. Turks did not think of themselves
as belonging to a nation, or even to a race, they were simply Moslems
who spoke Turkish; non-Moslems who did so were not Turks. Turks
never used the European description ‘Turkey’ until the twentieth
century. ‘Ottoman’ described a dynasty, and within the Ottoman
Empire the sultan’s subjects included the superior Moslem community
(. millet ) and the second-class but useful and tolerated non-Moslem
millets — Orthodox, Armenian and Jewish. A non-Moslem householder
had generally to pay a capitation tax, and traditionally the tribute of a
son for the sultan’s service, but the tribute had been replaced by a tax
before 1700. In the Empire, Islam was the established religion, which
could be adopted but never abandoned. Two further principles of the
Sacred Law hampered Turkish government and diplomacy in relation
to the West — first, that no process of law was required in dealing with
rebels, and secondly that no lands under Islamic rule could be ceded
by negotiation, but only by defeat in war.
Printing-presses were known in Turkey quite early, introduced by
1 Imperial Russian Historical Society, vol. 54 (St Petersburg, 1886), pp. 25-78: ‘Notice
sur . . . le due de Richelieu . . . k Odessa’ (by Ch. Sicard, writing in 1827 and resident at
Odessa since 1804).
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Jews (1493), Armenians (1567) and Orthodox (1627) for their own use;
but the first press authorised to print in Turkish (1727) excluded books
on religion and law, and was closed down in 1742 for forty years after
producing less than twenty books. Resistance to Western ideas came
chiefly from the Ulemas , and from the Janissaries, once the sultan’s
picked bodyguard, drawn as boys from his Christian subjects, but now a
horde of over-privileged hereditary hangers-on with little or no military
discipline. The Janissaries had secular as well as religious reasons for
alarm, for eighteenth-century sultans or their ministers began to see the
necessity of military reforms which were also urged on them by French
advisers. Military and naval technical schools were opened and closed
at intervals, but radical reform was first seriously attempted by Selim III
(1789-1807), only to be set back by a reaction which led to his deposi-
tion and the death of leading reformers. Mahmud II (1808-39) had
to bide his time until he felt strong enough at home finally to suppress
the Janissaries (1826) and revive a reform of the army. This came too
late for him to crush the Greek revolt, and much too late to reinvigorate
a truly Islamic Empire. So the military and technical reforms which he
desired had to be mixed after his death with a much less digestible dose
of Western legislation in the age of the Reorganisation ( Tanzimat ) begun
in 1839. It is unlikely, however, that success in technical reforms a
century earlier could long have stemmed the tide of other Western
influences after 1789. The Empire still had a medieval and feudal
structure, capped by a weight of bureaucracy heavier than any medieval
Western state had to bear. Inflation had added to the burden, agricul-
ture was hampered by taxes, industry also by economic apathy and
European immunities. There was never much lack of Moslem recruits
from Asia and the western Balkans ; but the sultans, no longer leaders in
war, were prisoners of the bureaucracy. The richest men in the Empire
were non-Moslems and therefore second-class subjects, whether
merchants or Phanariot Greek bankers and officials in the capital.
The Orthodox Church was domesticated in the Empire but not part of
the family, and its clergy were traditionally almost as suspicious of
the West as were the doctors of Islam.
Most of the provinces were pitifully unlike the parts of a coherent
Empire. Some regions had long been detached in all but name: the
sultan could react only feebly to the loss of the Crimea in 1783, and not
at all to that of Algiers in 1830 (Vol. X, Chapter XVI). In the inter-
vening period, the attachment of other regions was broken or weakened.
Moslem loyalty to Islam was genuine but did not imply subordination to
a central government, especially a distant one. Mahmud II did much to
recover control over the governors of his still undetached provinces;
but in Europe even the more Moslem districts like Albania and Bosnia
were too mountainous and wild to be governed easily; and in Asia even
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Anatolia, the most Turkish and most dependable region, had its own
troubles. Anatolia was nearly exempt from direct European inter-
vention, but it was disturbed by Kurdish tribesmen in the east and
distantly threatened by Russian conquests in the Caucasus and Turkish
Armenia. The Persians, belonging to the Shia sect of Islam, had never
been on good terms with the orthodox Sunni Turks, and had often
been at war with them for more political reasons. In this period, Persia
was too hard pressed by Russia to be herself any danger to Turkey;
defeated in two wars, she had to sacrifice much to Russia in the Treaties
of Gulistan (1813) and Turkmanchai (1828). The rivalry between French
and English in Persia during the Napoleonic wars was not unprofitable
to the shah, who received large subsidies from both sides without ever
committing himself to either; but the appearance of imposing rival
missions at Tehran, pressing money and military help on the shah on
condition of exclusive political alliance, pointed to a new phase of
western activity in the Middle East and Central Asia (p. 532). In so far
as it was anti-Russian activity, it was not unwelcome to the sultan, but
in the long run it meant that even his Asiatic provinces would be
dangerously near to the ‘great game’ of the European Powers in Asia. 1
A French invasion of Egypt, decisive as it was to be for later history,
and much as the idea had been canvassed in the past thirty years, cut
right across the traditional policies of France in the Levant— diplomatic
support for Turkey, protection for French merchants under the capitula-
tions and patronage of Latin Christians, especially in Syria and Palestine.
In spite of her commercial predominance, France’s prestige in Turkey
was low in 1789; the French were becoming sceptical about the value of
their old ally and did nothing to obstruct the encroachments of Catherine
II, provided that their other nominal ally, Austria, made no com-
pensating gains. 2 French speculations about trade with the East were
revived by writers like Raynal and Volney, and by the petitions (1790-)
of Magallon and other Marseilles merchants in Cairo who dwelt on
the prospect of overthrowing British supremacy in India by making
Egypt an entrepot for French eastern trade. There were also English
advocates of a forward policy to forestall the supposed designs of the
French. But the activities and alarms of interested persons were
damped by the indifference or hostility of their governments to any great
commitment, and by the fears of both East India Companies that a
short cut to India would damage their interests. A treaty with the
Mameluke beys, arranged in 1794 by the British consul in Egypt, was
ignored by the Foreign Office since he had already been recalled and in
1 H. W. C. Davis, ‘The Great Game in Asia, 1800-44’, in British Academy Proceedings
(London, 1926).
2 M. S. Anderson, ‘The Great Powers and the Russian Annexation of the Crimea’,
in Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 38 (London, 1958), pp. 17-42.
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any case the Privy Council had decided in 1790 against trying to develop
a trade via Suez. The revolutionary governments in Paris tried at first
to maintain the old policies. In 1793 young Bonaparte’s offer to
go to Constantinople as an artillery expert was not pursued, but an
envoy was unofficially received there, and two years later the sultan
followed the Prussian example by recognising the Republic, sent an
envoy to Paris and accepted some French military instructors. A few of
his Turkish advisers were already pressing for a regular army and
treasury and European alliances, in short for that ‘new look’ which
took shape in the Nizam-i-Djedid (new ordinance) of 1801 and was to
be intermittently pursued over many years to come. 1
Bonaparte’s victories in Italy (1796) led him and some of the Directory
to look eastwards, both to Greece and to Egypt. Two of his future
marshals, Augereau and Junot, were married to Greeks, and were pre-
sent when he despatched a Corsican Greek on a mission to spread his
fame among the Mainots (‘Spartans’). Bonaparte praised the patriot-
poet Rhigas (p. 545), and arranged to distribute a manifesto in the
Peloponnese and provide arms. He also sent an agent to the cunning and
ambitious Ali, Pasha of Yanina in Epirus, and very soon the French
were in the neighbouring Ionian Islands (p. 535). Even if the Directory
may have been glad to see Bonaparte expend his glory overseas, it was
he who pressed the expedition to Egypt upon them; he was stimulated
by Talleyrand who read a paper (July 1797) to the lnstitut on the
advantages of new colonies, naming Egypt. On Bonaparte’s return
to Paris, detailed plans were set on foot in January 1798; he and
Talleyrand (now foreign minister) slowly convinced the Directory.
The expedition assembling at Toulon was disguised as the ‘left wing of
the army of England’. On 12 April Bonaparte was ordered to seize
Egypt, ‘assure to the Republic the free and exclusive possession of the
Red Sea’ and also investigate the prospect for a canal to link it with the
Mediterranean.
In May the fleet sailed (at the very moment of a revolt in Ireland), but
Talleyrand was wrong in suggesting that Turkey might acquiesce. It is
true that, except for England, already at war, governments hesitated
while the French seized Malta, Alexandria and Cairo; but the news of
Nelson’s victory at Aboukir Bay (1 August) stirred the sultan to allow
a Russian naval squadron through the Straits into the Mediterranean,
declare war on France and make treaties of alliance with Russia and
England, while Russia in turn allied herself to England. Austria was
drawn in (January 1799) for fear of losing her last footholds in Italy.
Thus the Egyptian adventure, with its specific threats to all these
interests, produced a coalition which succeeded in keeping France out
of the Levant — a kind of foretaste of the events of 1840 (see Vol. X,
1 E. O. Ciragan, La politique ottomane pendant les guerres de Napoleon (AuriUac, 1952).
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pp. 254-8, 429). Not even the Russian alliance (1807) could save
Napoleon from frustration in the East. Aboukir proved decisive;
neither Napoleon nor his admiral can be blamed for this defeat, which
was due to the ill-prepared state of the navy and to the initial luck
and the bold genius of Nelson. 1 The Directory quickly lost interest,
already within a month refusing to attempt reinforcement. It is true
that, since the French army could not get home at present, the Directory
suggested (4 November) that it might go on either to India or to
Constantinople; but they offered no plan or help or hope of help, and
there is no evidence that Napoleon had such adventures in mind when he
led his army into Syria (March-June 1799) without consulting Paris.
He was already before Acre when this suggestion reached him, and had
given his own reasons clearly in February — namely to starve the British
fleet of supplies, make Egypt secure and force the sultan to acquiesce.
It was not the first or the last time that a power in Egypt has wanted
to secure Syria too. Even if Acre had fallen, Napoleon knew that day-
dreams with maps, and mystification of his entourage, were not the
same as concrete plans for undertakings within his grasp. On his
return from Syria (July 1799) he defeated a Turkish fleet and army, he
was busy organising Upper as well as Lower Egypt, and he did not
share the Directory’s desire now to cut their losses; but the general
outlook was bleak — Corfu had fallen to a combined Russo-Turkish
fleet in March and the French were nearly driven out of Italy. Depart-
ing secretly for Paris in August, he left orders, if no help came before
May, to negotiate with Turkey (not with England) for evacuation; but
the terms accepted by his dispirited successor Kleber as early as
January 1800 were nullified by renewed fighting, and on Kleber’s death
General Menou, who had embraced Islam, had more faith in a future
for Egypt as a French colony, and nursed an ill-founded belief that
England might acquiesce. Meanwhile, French prospects in Europe were
reviving and Napoleon, now master, agreed with Menou. He was soon
busy negotiating with Russia for peace, with a radical partition of the
Turkish Empire.
These negotiations hung fire for months. The unpredictable Tsar
Paul I withdrew in effect from the war against France, agreed (December
1800) to an Armed Neutrality directed against England, and even set in
motion the Russian contingent for an ill-considered joint Russo-French
invasion of India. Even Austria seemed interested in a partition of
Turkey. But Paul never agreed to let the French stay in Egypt, and all
these schemes collapsed on his assassination (March 1801). Napoleon
at once began to discuss peace with England too. At the same time, the
British were resolved to expel the French from Egypt first, and to put
Turkey under an obligation to them for doing so. Menou could not
1 G. Douin, La flotte de Bonaparte sur les cotes d'£gypte (Cairo, 1922).
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prevent the British landing in March and was obliged to capitulate and
depart in September. Early in October England, Turkey and Russia
had each come to terms with Napoleon (the first two by preliminaries
not completed until March and June 1802). Egypt was to be restored
to the sultan, but this did not debar him from inviting the British to
help him reassert his authority and protect him from France by keeping
their own army there. Meanwhile, the British commander had deeply
committed himself to support the old order (or disorder) of rule by
the Mameluke beys; unable either to arrange a compromise with the
sultan or to sponsor an effective substitute for the French administra-
tion, the British force withdrew in March 1803, only two months
before England and France were again at war. After all, neither the
Turks nor the beys were able to govern, and the future of Egypt was to
lie with Muhammad Ali.
The British government had shown little interest in Egypt up to 1798.
The French conquest, anticipated by nobody in authority except Dundas
and some of his ‘ London-Indian ’ advisers, changed all that. Immedi-
ately, Dundas gave orders to close the mouth of the Red Sea by sending
an Indian force to the Island of Perim (soon moved to the less un-
healthy Aden). A treaty with the local sultan (1802) was a pointer
towards the later annexation of Aden as a coaling port (1838-9). In
1801 an Indian contingent arrived at Kosseir on the western side of the
Red Sea, just too late to take part in driving the French out of Egypt
but showing that, if India might be invaded from Egypt, the reverse
could be even more true. The Navy kept watch on the lie de France
(Mauritius) until it was seized in 1810. In the Persian Gulf, the East
India Company excluded the French from Oman by treaty and put a
resident in Muscat. Their residency in Bagdad (since 1798) was made
permanent (1802), and soon (1820) absorbed the functions of the older-
established consul at Basra, with the new title of ‘Political Agent in
Turkish Arabia’. Malcolm’s mission to Tehran (1800) secured treaties
by which Persia promised, not very reliably, to admit no Frenchmen
(p. 529). A regular service of mail between London and India was
organised (from 1802) via Aleppo and Bagdad, a route occasionally
used in the past for important despatches. In 1809 a Treaty was made
with the Shah of Afghanistan. These energetic measures, combined
with the defeat and death of Tipu Sultan in Mysore (May 1799), gave
confidence against any French attempt on India or the approaches to
India. In reality, British fears and French hopes were focused through-
out not on such epic feats but on the long-term consequences of a
consolidated French hold on Egypt. Thus it was the French adventure
of 1798 which not only awakened Egypt out of sleep but also stimulated
Englishmen to much more active and forward policies from Malta
eastwards.
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The activities of the French savants in Egypt were widely heralded,
and later enshrined in the sumptuous volumes of the Description de
VEgypte . 1 These included the famous Memoire 2 of the engineer Le Pere
about a canal, based on a hasty survey which seemed to confirm
Aristotle’s belief that the Red Sea level was above that of the Mediter-
ranean, and advocating two canals with locks (Suez-Nile, Nile-
Alexandria) at low cost, which would cut the distance to Pondicherry in
half and the time by 25 per cent, provided the route were secured by a
European colony in Egypt. At the time, the Egyptians were more
impressed by the deference (unwelcome to some of his staff) which
Napoleon insisted on showing to Islam, and above all by his tireless
propagation of the idea that the Turks were degenerate tyrants and the
Mosque of A 1 Azhar at Cairo the true repository of Islamic law and
tradition. Here was the germ of an Egyptian nationalism which was to
ripen much later. The British occupation (1801-3) had no aim more
radical than that of keeping out the French during the war, and it made
no appeal to the imagination. The prestige of the French was not for-
gotten. In the civil war which smouldered 1803-7, the French and
British consuls were active, but the sole gainer was Muhammad Ali
(born in Macedonia in 1769, the year of Napoleon and Wellington
too), whose influence over the sultan’s Albanian mercenaries enabled
him, by dexterous shifts, to make himself Pasha of Cairo (May 1805)
and to be recognised by the sultan as Pasha of Egypt (October 1806).
The sultan’s recognition (1806) of Napoleon as emperor and now
apparently the master in Europe, led the British Cabinet, in fear of a
French return, to re-occupy Alexandria (March 1 807) ; but the expedi-
tion was ill-conducted, Napoleon’s alliance with Russia (July) destroyed
for the moment his influence at the Porte, and Muhammad Ali showed
foresight in negotiating a British withdrawal (September) on terms
which left room for reconciliation.
The pasha was now master of Alexandria for the first time, he knew
that the British controlled the sea, and in the next few years he did good
business in victualling their ships and armies in the Mediterranean,
acquiring a monopoly of corn (and soon of other goods) which was
highly profitable to his treasury. He expropriated or reassessed land-
owners and religious foundations, and built up an army which was
reliable because regularly paid. Having crushed the Mameluke beys
by a treacherous massacre (1811), he turned his eyes eastwards. In
attacking the puritan Moslem sect of the Wahabis, who had gained
control over Medina, Mecca and the Hijaz and were interrupting the
1 Description de Vfgypte . . ., 24 vols. (Paris, 1809-22), comprising a Preface historique,
Antiquites (4 vols.), Etat Moderne, (3 vols.), Histoire Naturelle (2 vols.). Agriculture et
Commerce (1 vol.), Planches (11 vols.), Carte topographique (2 vols.).
8 flat Moderne (1809), vol. 1, pp. 21-186.
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annual pilgrimages, he was both obeying the order of the sultan and
seeking religious and political prestige for himself. His success (with
French advisers) after a savage and costly struggle (181 1— 1 8) earned for
his warrior son Ibrahim the sultan’s firman for a nominal lordship over
the Hijaz and even Abyssinia; this meant at least that he could claim
to appoint governors in some of the Red Sea ports on both sides, and
collect tolls on the produce of Arabia and the Sudan for export to India.
He next (1820) advanced directly from Egypt into the Sudan — in search
of slaves, who proved of little use as soldiers, and of gold with disap-
pointing results ; but he maintained an uneasy grip over the Sudan, both
east and west of the Nile, up to some 300 miles south of Khartum. In
spite of corruption, cruelty and constant disturbances, the Sudan was
spasmodically developed and began to look to Cairo as its cultural
Mecca. Khartum grew from a small village in 1820 to some 50,000
in 1883 (more than two-thirds were slaves); during the British occupa-
tion it was to rise to half a million in the 1950’s.
Muhammad Ali’s successes were not at first unwelcome to the British,
whose Indian trade in the Red Sea was disturbed by Wahabi pirates.
In the opinion (1816) of Henry Salt, the consul-general, ‘the pasha has
become so complete a merchant that he has placed himself entirely at
our mercy, his revenue now so vitally depending upon commerce . . .’
which could be cut off at any time, by a blockade of Alexandria or his
Red Sea ports. But his preference for French advisers, and his mount-
ing ambitions, caused uneasiness in London and at Constantinople.
From 1819 he had the services of the French Colonel Seve, who as
Suleiman Pasha trained a new model army at Aswan, recruited at first
from the Sudan and then from the hitherto unwarlike Egyptian peasants
(fellahin). Already he was assembling a useful flotilla in the Red Sea,
and from 1821 he began to acquire a Mediterranean squadron. For
engineers, archaeologists and teachers, he also employed Frenchmen by
preference, playing off France against England and both against
interference by the Porte. He differed from most conquerors in his
realistic sense of limits, knowing that he could not afford to break openly
with the sultan or to aim at it if England were his enemy; his attempt to
appease all three led him unwillingly into burning his fingers in Greece
(p. 548) and later in Syria (Vol. X, p. 428), but he recovered from both
setbacks and founded a dynasty which survived his death in 1849 by
more than a century.
If Muhammad Ali gave a certain coherence to the story of Egypt, the
fortunes of war left their mark, more capriciously, on almost every
region of the Levant. When Venice, along with her northern Adriatic
dependencies, was ceded to Austria at Campo Formio (1797), her
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much-neglected southern ones went to France, including the Ionian
Islands and outposts on the mainland opposite. These had already
been occupied four months earlier by a French expedition in the name
of the momentarily ‘liberated’ Venetian Republic. Trees of liberty and
French principles were planted, disturbing in different ways the
Italianate Catholic nobles and the Orthodox Greek population. This
first French occupation was ended in March 1799 by a strange Russo-
Turkish combination, which created (March 1800) an Ionian Republic,
nominally under their joint protection but actually under that of Russia
alone, with a Russian garrison. An aristocratic constitution was devised
and modified, operated under the eye of Mocenigo, the Russian envoy,
and paying more attention than in the past to the Orthodox religion
and Greek speech of the people. At Tilsit (July 1807), Alexander I
handed over the Islands to Napoleon, but the smaller ones could not
long be held against British sea-power and Corfu itself capitulated
after Napoleon’s fall. With all these changes of masters, a new Greek
sentiment began to prevail in the hitherto Italianate Islands; it was the
Russian occupation that directed the career of the Corfiot John Capo
d’lstria (Capodistrias) into the service of the tsar (1809); in spite of his
personal influence with Alexander by 1815, he failed to secure real
independence for the Islands; knowing that it would be a shadowy
independence at best for so small a unit, and that England would not
tolerate the Russians there, he preferred a British protectorate and
occupation to the Austrian one suggested at one moment by the
British Cabinet. The British treatment of the Islands as virtually a
crown colony soon confirmed hi m in his belief that Orthodox Greeks
should look to the Orthodox tsar for salvation, though not for sub-
jection. As Mocenigo’s right-hand man during the Russian occupation
he had learned, in preparing to defend the Islands against Ali Pasha
(1807), to know some of the Greek chieftains of the Peloponnese, and
he was in close touch with Ignatius, the Metropolitan bishop of Arta,
an active partisan of Greek hopes and later the centre (in his retreat at
Pisa) of a philhellene circle. Capodistrias’s antipathy to British rule was
confirmed during his visit to Corfu in 1819, and the speculation then
aroused produced (probably unknown to him) a crop of Ionian enrol-
ments in the Philike Hetairia (pp. 538-9, 546-7). Unrest became
endemic in the Islands until their union with Greece in 1864 (Vol. X,
p. 426).
North of Corfu, the wars brought new masters, and some fighting, to
the eastern shores of the Adriatic. Though Napoleon had arranged for
Austria the odium of being the despoiler of proud Venice (1797), he
probably regarded this as no more than a temporary expedient; after
Austerlitz (December 1805), he annexed Istria and the Dalmatian coast-
land, along with the isolated harbour of Cattaro which was separated
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from the southern tip of Dalmatia by the ancient Republic of Ragusa
(now Dubrovnik) but gave an access through semi-independent
Montenegro to the wild interior. Russia forestalled the French in
Cattaro, but ceded it at Tilsit (July 1807) to Napoleon, who had mean-
while seized Ragusa instead — and kept it. After Wagram (1809)
Austria had to cede also her inland provinces north of Bosnia; these
became, with the Adriatic coastlands, the French province of Illyria
and were all transferred back to Austria in 1815, stamped by Marshal
Marmont with the usual marks of Napoleonic rule — sweeping adminis-
trative reforms and improvements along with grinding taxation and sub-
ordination to the conqueror’s purposes. The French were not popular
at the end, but the revival of the ancient name of Illyria caught the
imagination of some of the South Slavs. While the Russians were in
Cattaro (1806-7) there was talk of sending a force across from the lower
Danube to the Adriatic, rousing the western Balkan peoples into revolt.
Five years later, a similar scheme of Chichagov, Russian commander
on the lower Danube, died when Russia had to make peace hastily with
Turkey at Bucarest (May 1812) and bring her Danubian army north
against the Grand Army of Napoleon; but it left some traces.
Capodistrias believed that ‘some consolation was required for the
peoples whom Russia was forced to abandon for the fourth time to
Turkish vengeance’; he and Chichagov pressed for increasing through-
out Turkey in Europe the number of Russian consuls, whose principal
aim would not be commercial but ‘ to prepare the spirits of the oppressed,
so as to promote by their zeal the Porte’s good intentions in case of an
alliance or to declare openly in our favour if some day a decision is made
to break the Porte’s resistance’. This suggestion, though not a new one,
was to bear more fruit in the coming years. A decision to ‘break the
Porte’s resistance’ could not be made in 1812, nor in 1815, nor (as the
nineteenth century was to show) could it ever be made by Russia and
the Balkan peoples alone. Yet Russia was so near to becoming the
decisive factor that their history in this period may fairly be reviewed
in this context.
The Danubian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, tributary to
the sultan and obliged to supply Constantinople with food, contained
a large number of wealthy boyars (titled landowners). Their culture and
that of the higher orthodox clergy, including the monasteries, had
become mainly Greek since the seventeenth century, and that of the
greater boyars was now mingled also with western influences. Most of
this was centred in the capitals: Wallachian Bucharest, a city of some
70,000 which liked to be called ‘the new Athens’, and the much smaller
Moldavian Jassy. Each had its Academy: Greek books were imported
from Vienna and Leipzig, and the works of the philosophes were intro-
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duced by French tutors and doctors. Each had its court around the
ruling hospodar (governor), usually a wealthy Phanariot Greek and
often acquainted with French through service as a dragoman (inter-
preter) between the Porte and the European embassies.
The tenure of the hospodars was extremely precarious. In the
eighteenth century, these and other lucrative offices were usually pur-
chased by Phanariot Greeks who were the sultan’s sole agents for such
appointments. Greek influence was spread further by their marriages
into boyar families. The high cost of offices made quick profits necessary
during the short tenure of three or four years which suited the sultan’s
treasury. Without any right to conduct foreign relations, the hospodars
were able in practice to seek rewards for helping or hindering the
policies of Austria or Russia in the wars of both against Turkey. Each
of these powers provided some stimulus for change: Austria by pro-
viding a market for grain and by the example of a better local administra-
tion in Transylvania, in ‘Little Wallachia’ (occupied 1718-39) and later
in Bukovina (annexed 1775); Russia by her insistence on rules for the
nomination or removal of hospodars and for the observance of
privileges. These rules and privileges, repeatedly confirmed or extended,
were often ignored with impunity, but provided treaty grounds for
Russian intervention at favourable moments. 1 From 1782 Russian
consuls at Bucharest and Jassy acted as watchdogs for treaty rights and
soon became the focal centres of a Russophil party. During the occupa-
tion of 1806-12, the Russian commander ordered prayers to be said for
the tsar as ruler, named an exarch to manage the clergy under the
Patriarch of Moscow, and treated the two provinces as virtually
Russian. Yet even the ruling classes, accustomed to manoeuvre
between rival powers, found the occupation more burdensome than ever
before and resented Russia’s annexation of Bessarabia (a part of
Wallachia) in 1812 when she abandoned the rest. There was growing
among the boyars a desire for government more stable, less subject to
foreign pressures and more devoted to their own local interests. For
some forty years, needing more labour, they had gradually increased the
real burdens of the peasants, particularly by extension of the corvee, in
spite of the abolition of personal serfdom before 1750. They wanted to
pursue unhindered the profit derived from this process of replacing
customary by commercial farming. 2
1 Most of the European treaties with Turkey (1699-1812) are summarised in C. G. de
Koch and M. S. F. Schoell, Histoire abregee des trades de paix depuis la paix de Westphalie
(Paris, 1818), vol. xiv, pp. 229-542; revised edition (Brussels, 1838), vol. rv, pp. 339-441.
Those after 1814 will be found in Sir E. Hertslet, Map of Europe by Treaty, 3 vols. (London,
1875). F. Martens, Recueil des Trails et Conventions conclus par la Russie, 15 vols. (St
Petersburg, 1874-1909), covers only Austria, Germany, England and France.
* A. Otetea, ‘Le second asservissement des paysans roumains (1746-1821)’, in Nouvelles
Etudes d'histoire presentees au X‘ Congres des Sciences historiques (Bucharest, 1955),
PP- 299-312.
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Below the circle of the hellenised upper classes, the Slav liturgy
and church books had been gradually replaced by the Roumanian
vernacular, which was considered a less dangerous rival to Greek
influence; the language of the people also had some literary embodiment,
mainly in chronicles. But a Roumanian national sentiment as a positive
force was hardly native; rather, it came from Austrian Transylvania,
where Roumanian was spoken and used in schools, and where the
Orthodox clergy were not supervised by the Greek Patriarch at Con-
stantinople. Encouraged by Joseph II, they refused to be treated as
Uniates under Rome, and they were eventually (1810) placed under the
care of an Austrian-Serb Orthodox bishop. It was a Transylvanian,
George Lazar (a peasant by origin, with a Vienna doctor’s degree),
who introduced a Roumanian note into his school at Bucharest, incul-
cating a spirit of pride in the language of the people and in the story of
their Roman origins.
The fruit of this new spirit was to ripen slowly, but in the years
between 1815 and 1821 the great activity of the Greek Hetairia
in Bucharest was linked with that of individuals whose motives for
insurrection were not Greek. The co-ordinator of the Hetairia there
was employed in the Russian Consulate. He was associated with
Russian officers in Bessarabia who were later prominent among the
Decembrists; he was also in touch not only with Kara George and other
Serbian refugees in Russia (pp. 542-3), but also with Tudor Vladimirescu,
a Roumanian professional soldier who had been in Russian service and
was now seeking to combine a peasant insurrection against the boyar
landowners with a wider plan for throwing off the Turkish yoke. It
seems that Tudor was not an enemy of the Hetairia, but hoped to use
the coming insurrection in his own way. Some Russian army and
consular officers hoped to manoeuvre the tsar into war with Turkey,
which might bring changes within Russia in its train. Their activities
in turn fostered the hopes of the emigre Serbs, the discontents of the
Roumanian enemies of boyar privilege, and the ambitions of the
ubiquitous Greeks. Most of the great boyars and Phanariot Greeks
dreaded the consequences of an armed insurrection, but some of them
were impressed by the position of Capodistrias as the tsar’s adviser
and by the confidence of Alexander Hypsilantes.
Hypsilantes, chosen in 1820 as leader of the Hetairia, was the son
of a Russophil Greek hospodar; formerly an aide-de-camp to the tsar,
he was popular in Russian court circles and had lost an arm in the
Russian campaign of 1813. His incursion across the Pruth into
Moldavia early in 1821 found so little support among the boyars in
Jassy that he hardly dared to proceed to Bucarest, while Tudor, having
started his own insurrection, seemed to be changing its character from
a social movement against the boyars generally into an alliance with the
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lesser boyars against the Phanariots. Whatever Tudor’s real intentions
in Bucharest may have been, Hypsilantes’ appearance there nine days
later led inevitably to a breach between two men whose aims were
irreconcilable. 1 Deserted by some of his captains, Tudor was arrested
and put to death by Hypsilantes, who already knew that in March
Capodistrias had been obliged to draft at Laibach the tsar’s censure
on this adventure. This killed any hope that Alexander I might be
forced, even against his present will, to save Russian prestige in the
Balkans by declaring immediate war on Turkey.
This ill-conceived insurrection was soon at an end, but it sparked
off the less unpromising movement in the Peloponnese (p. 547). This
was precisely one of its objects, and in any case the year 1821 became a
landmark in Roumanian history too. The two hospodars had felt
obliged to give some countenance to the insurrection after it began.
The sultan at first nominated two new Greek Phanariots in their places,
but soon decided to appoint native rulers who might help him against
both Greeks and Russians. The result was rather different. As the
Turkish armies moved in to restore order, most of the wealthiest boyars
fled into Russia or Austria, and some hoped for rescue even by a
Russian annexation. Many of the lesser boyars were ready at least for a
permanent protectorate, but they were more hostile to Greek influence;
and those of Moldavia pressed in 1822 for a native aristocratic con-
stitution. They had to wait through the suspense of Tsar Alexander’s
last years for the new forward policy of Nicholas I; but this time the
Russian occupation (1828-34) during and after the war was more than
an interlude. The Russian governor Count Kisselew, a cultivated and
intelligent man, was able to embody in the Reglement Organique of 1831
a fairly coherent system. The long overdue administrative reforms were
mostly welcomed at the time and praised by later critics; but the
political and economic settlement was an almost complete surrender to
the boyar aristocracy, both Greek and native. The hospodar was
constitutionally limited by their Assembly, but also by provisions ensur-
ing Russian predominance. The peasant’s minimum holding was
reduced, his obligatory work was in effect increased, and it was almost
impossible for him to move without leave. Much of this was drafted
before Kisselew arrived, and he regretted that he ‘could not defend the
peasants against a greedy and excited oligarchy’ because the boyars
knew that the Russian government needed their support. 2 Thus the
Principalities began the modern period of their history better equipped
for economic exploitation than for political or social well-being.
1 S. Stirbu, ‘Tudor Vladimirescu et les mouvements de liberation’, in Nouvelles
Etudes . . . (1955), assembles evidence that Tudor was closely in touch with the Hetairfa
long before the insurrection, and was not opposed to its anti-Turkish aims.
* A. D. Xenopol, Histoire des Roumains (Paris, 1896), vol. n, pp. 407-19.
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Nevertheless, they were irrevocably separated in effect from Turkey,
and were able for a century to rely on the Western powers against
a Russian monopoly of influence over them.
‘Bulgaria’ was hardly even a current geographical expression, but
‘Roumelia’ (a term used loosely) included a sturdy population of Bulgar-
speaking peasants and craftsmen, whose memories of greater days were
vaguely preserved in song and legend and in the exploits of the haidouks
(mountain bandit-patriots). Here, too, changes and upheavals were at
work. The military feudalism of the Turks was giving way to a growth
of trade and craft industry and a greater differentiation of wealth. After
each of the Russian or Austrian wars against Turkey, Bulgarian ex-
soldiers either joined roving bands of robbers at home or took service
with rebellious Turkish magnates. Other fighting men, and craftsmen
too, escaped violence at home by emigrating into the Danubian
Principalities or Habsburg territory or southern Russia (including
Bessarabia after 1812). A refuge was indeed all that Russia could offer
in this period; larger hopes were completely frustrated both in 1812 and
again in 1829.
In spite of the almost complete hellenisation of the Church (except
for a few monasteries) and of many literate townspeople, the Bulgars
were never assimilated by the Greeks. Books in Bulgarian had long
been circulating in manuscript, especially the popular patriotic history
compiled from chronicles in 1762 (after a visit to Austria) by Paissii,
a monk of Mount Athos. Western influences penetrated deviously
from merchants of Ragusa and from Austrian-educated Serbs such as
Jovan Rajic, who published in Vienna (1794-5) a four- volume History
of the various Slav peoples, especially Bulgars, Croats and Serbs. No
books seem to have been printed in Bulgaria before about 1840, but
Bishop Sofronie, a disciple of Paissii, produced sermons in Bulgarian,
settled (1803) in Bucharest and shared the simmering excitement of
emigrants and others whose eyes were fixed on Russia. A pupil of his
founded after 1814 some Bulgarian church schools as a weapon
against Greek influence. Later, a young Ruthenian, Yuri Venelin, who
had been educated at the University of Lemberg (Lvov), was confirmed
in his romantic zeal for the Slavs by study in Bessarabia. Encouraged
in Moscow by Aksakov and other Slavophils to study Bulgarian history,
he produced in 1829 the first of several polemical works 1 which had little
historical value but gave an impetus to revival of the language and led
to the founding, from 1835, of a number of Bulgarian schools with more
1 Y. I. Venelin (1802-39), The ancient and modern Bulgarians in their political, national
and religious relations with the Russians. Vol. 1 (Moscow, 1829); vol. n, posthumous (1841);
and other writings in Russian, ail contesting the current theory of their Tartar-Turkish
origins. He first visited Bulgaria in the i830’s. Article on Venelin in the Soviet Encyclopedia
(Moscow, 1949-57).
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secular and nationalist aims. But the efforts of these and other in-
dividuals hardly amounted as yet even to a literary revival.
Meanwhile, in the mountains and forests of Serbia, a not un-
prosperous society of warriors and pig-breeding farmers had been
exposed to new pressures from different sides. First, the Habsburgs
helped many families from Turkish Serbia to settle among the other
Slavs in southern Hungary (recovered in 1686); the Austrian occupation
of Belgrade (1719-39) brought the Serbs, north and south of the
Danube, still more into contact; later, Joseph II gave his South Slavs
privileges, especially in educational and ecclesiastical affairs, as an
offset against Magyar domination. This made the sultan’s Serbians
turn their eyes northwards in hope. At the same time, their own once
tolerable conditions were becoming intolerable. The sultan’s hope was
to detach them from Austrian leanings by promoting hellenisation
through the agency of the Patriarch at Constantinople, who was in the
eighteenth century little more than his agent. But he was also dispersing
the unruly Janissaries away from the capital into the provinces, and
allotting some of the worst of them to Serbia — a primitive region, but
prosperous enough to be harried and bullied with profit. Many
Serbs fought for Austria in her Turkish and German wars, but her
withdrawal from the war on Turkey at the Peace of Sistova in 1791 dis-
appointed them. Others, inspired by Peter the Great’s help to a rising
in Montenegro (1711), and now by Catherine II’s aggressive policy,
began to look to Russia, where a number of Serbs had settled to escape
from Magyar oppression in Hungary. The reforms of Selim III bene-
fited the Serbs in the region of Belgrade by excluding the Janissaries,
but his popular pasha there was hampered and eventually slain (1801)
by the Janissaries who returned and took revenge by beheading seventy
to eighty Serbian notables.
This was the origin of the resistance organised from 1804 by Kara
George, at first with some aid and comfort from both Austria and
Russia; but both powers were now more concerned to stiffen Turkish
resistance to France. A Serbian delegation to St Petersburg was told
that, although Russia could not aid a rebellion, she might send a consul
to Belgrade as guarantor of their autonomy. This, and some initial
successes in the field, encouraged the Serbs to raise their demands, while
they organised an Assembly (Skuptchina) to elect a senate of six under
a constitution drafted by an Austrian Serb who was now a professor at
Kharkov in Russia. The sultan insisted that, being no longer petitioners
but rebels, they must first disarm and submit. Instead, they defeated
Turkish armies coming from the west and the south (August 1806); and,
when the sultan had declared war on Russia (December), they soon
appeared as open rebels in spite of big concessions made by Turkey
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(Treaty of 25 January 1807). Kara George gambled on a Russian victory
and even offered to accept a Russian governor and garrison; but the
news of Alexander’s reconciliation with Napoleon at Tilsit led him to
turn half-seriously to the Austrians, offering to incorporate an enlarged
Serbia under the Habsburgs, provided it would not be treated as part of
Hungary. While Kara George continued to play off Austria against
Russia, the tsar wavered between two plans: listening to Napoleon’s
never whole-hearted talk about partition, or relying instead on hopes of
extending his influence in Turkey without French help by gaining the
confidence of the Serbs and other potential allies from within. In St
Petersburg, Rumyantsev and Caulaincourt went on fencing about a
future partition, but Serbia does not seem to have been mentioned when
the tsar met Napoleon at Erfurt in October 1808. Alexander had with-
held approval of the Serbian constitution, and the warmth of his
agents’ language seemed to vary with their need of Serbian help in their
own dealings with the new Sultan Mahmud II. Kara George jumped the
gun by getting his new Senate itself to declare him hereditary prince
(December 1808); his further vain appeals to Napoleon, and once more
to Austria, were disavowed by the Skuptchina, and early in 1810 a
Russian Resident, who had left Belgrade six months earlier, returned,
this time with troops, to secure Russian influence.
In December 1810 Napoleon at last acquiesced in the Russians’
control over the Principalities (which they had never evacuated), while
holding out hopes to Austria of control in Serbia. While the Serbs
were convinced that one of the powers would eventually outbid the rest
as guarantor of Serbian autonomy, the sultan was equally convinced
that the jealousy of the rest would be enough to keep the Russians
north of the Danube. The tsar’s urgent need for peace with Turkey
produced the hastily drafted Treaty of Bucharest (28 May 1812, cf.
p. 536), whose interpretation was to be the subject of endless disputes
over the next fifteen years. Under Article 8, the Serbians were to have
an autonomous status like that of the Aegean Islanders, collecting the
sultan’s tribute themselves, but allowing restricted Turkish garrisons in
Belgrade and other fortresses; but they were triply deceived. First,
Chichagov, disliking the Treaty and dreaming of a march across Serbia
to the Adriatic, concealed and even denied to the Serbians the existence
of Article 8, until he was ordered (August 1812) to take his army
north against Napoleon. Secondly, the sultan was expecting the
Russians to be defeated and had no intention of giving effect to the
Article voluntarily. Thirdly, Kara George himself refused to submit
to the terms, and falsely announced that the invading Turkish armies of
revenge were acting contrary to the sultan’s will.
The result was the Turkish occupation of Belgrade (October 1813)
and the flight into Austria of thousands of families; Kara George
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himself and most of the leading insurgents were removed a year later
out of Austria into Russia at the tsar’s personal request. Milosh
Obrenovich, the one leader who had not emigrated, was encouraged by
the conciliatory behaviour of the new pasha to submit and to accept
headship of a district. Soon, however, a Serbian envoy was producing
evidence of renewed oppression to the sovereigns at Vienna; he obtained
several interviews with Capodistrias, and two with the Habsburg
emperor himself. Capodistrias was probably the author of a Russian
circular to the Powers (2 February 1813) in which their right to intervene
was based on the novel ground that, although the Moslems were the
sultan’s subjects, the Christians were only his tributaries, owing him no
allegiance and entitled to place themselves under the protection of any
European Power. This plea for a kind of collective guarantee, not of the
sultan but of the Christians in Turkey, was never submitted to the
Congress, but its argument was radical and far-reaching. For the
moment, after some partial successes in a renewed insurrection, Milosh
accepted improved terms direct from the sultan (December 1815):
Turks were to reside only in or near the fortresses ; the Serbians were to
collect the fixed tribute themselves, with freedom for their religion and
education and for trade throughout the Empire, and the right to maintain
a representative at Constantinople.
The rule of Milosh differed little in avarice and tyranny from that of
many a pasha. When the Russians allowed some of the emigres to slip
back into Serbia, their severed heads were sent by Milosh to Con-
stantinople. Kara George, the irreconcilable, who had lately been
admitted at Jassy as a member of the Greek Hetairia, was among the
victims (July 1817); nine years later, his son was cruelly mutilated for his
part in Hetairist plans to mobilise the Serbians. Milosh paid little atten-
tion to Russia’s interest in the Serbians in the course of her disputes
(1816-21) about the Treaty of Bucharest; these disputes were interrupted
by the Greek revolt. He rejected Hypsilantes’ appeal for help, and kept
Serbia out of the long struggle of the Greeks and the Russo-Turkish war
of 1828-9, though the potential menace to the Turks of his autonomy
helped the Russians indirectly at the end. His policy of conditional
loyalty to the sultan was not unrewarded. At the Peace of Adrianople
(September 1829) Turkey was required publicly to confirm the privileges
promised to the Serbians in Article 8 of the Treaty of Bucharest, as
interpreted in the Treaty of Akkerman (October 1826), and in addition
to restore to Serbia six districts detached in 1813. Finally, in October
1830 Milosh obtained the long-sought recognition by the sultan of his
hereditary status, which had more than once been affirmed by the
Skuptchina. In pursuing his own ambitions, he had achieved a real
autonomy for Serbia. Though harshly and corruptly ruled, the country
was now being equipped with schools, printing presses and newspapers
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and with the beginnings of a regular army. All this had been achieved
without exclusive reliance on Russia or any other Power, and without
those impulsive offers of complete subjection which Kara George had
made in turn to Austria, France and Russia. Time was to bring its
revenges against the Obrenovieh family, for the heroism of Kara George
made a greater appeal than the cruel cunning of Milosh ; but it is hard
to see how a more intransigent policy towards Turkey after 1815 could
have borne so much fruit for a country whose alternative fate was
likely to be absorption by the Russian or the Austrian Empire.
The Greeks were differently placed. Although not influenced by
direct contact with Austria or Russia across a land frontier, they were
also less exposed to the calamities of war. The men of the coasts and
islands were open to the sea, and so to a greater knowledge of the
outer world. They were able to use their maritime skill and resources,
and so eventually to interest not only Russia but the greatest sea powers,
Britain and France, in a settlement of their struggle with the Turks.
In the mountains north of the Isthmus, life was mostly primitive and
insecure, but trade and schools kept some regions in contact with the
outer world. In the Peloponnese, the Venetian occupation from 1687
to 1715 (1699-1718 by Treaties) benefited agriculture in some ways, but
it hampered the Greek Church and Greek traders by restrictions
favouring Rome and Venice, and its ending was not regretted. Two-
thirds of the land was owned by Moslems, who hardly exceeded one-
tenth of the population. The Greeks of the Peloponnese had an
exceptional degree of local autonomy, organised by election of notables
and clergy; at the top, their Senate assessed the taxes, negotiated with
the Turkish governor and could appeal direct to the sultan through
delegates at the capital. Although this system did not exclude bribery,
caprice and violence, it gave the notables political experience which could
easily turn from enjoyment of local privileges into a desire for more.
The islands had even more autonomy and hardly any resident Turks.
Russia made no appeal to the Balkan Christians in her war of 1737-9;
in her next war, the brothers Orlov, sent by Catherine II in 1770 to
organise a rising in the Peloponnese as a diversion, soon failed to
persuade the Greeks that the small Russian force had serious intentions,
and the only result was to bring retribution on the people, whether
rebels or not. Nevertheless, Russian prestige was enhanced in Greece
by the Treaties of Kutchuk Kainardji (1774) and Jassy (1792) which
included ill-defined stipulations in favour of the sultan’s Orthodox
subjects; in 1783 also, Russia secured for Greek ships the privilege of
trading under her flag. Merchants could purchase immunities by license
( berat ) from European consuls; when Selim III tried to remedy this
abuse of the Capitulations by selling privileges himself, he merely
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created a recognised class of prosperous beratlis. Moreover, a mer-
chant’s son, sent abroad for study or trade, might procure the privileges
of a European on his return. Greeks made full use of these chances.
The wars left Greece unravaged, more populous and more prosperous
than before; the island traders in particular profited as carriers and
smugglers. Rich Greeks were generous founders of schools, hospitals
and charities. By the combined effect of Phanariot influence at the
capital and pervasive activity at all levels, the Greeks seemed capable in
time of capturing much of Turkey in Europe from within. The alterna-
tive — open revolt against an Empire which had immense reserves of
power in its appeal to Islam — presented a terrifying prospect and was
not easily envisaged, though individual Phanariots were tempted by
foreign influence to risk a combination of both methods.
The importance of the literary revival is hard to assess. Some of it
had its origin inside Greece, much of it outside. For example, Vienna
and Trieste each had in 1750 an Orthodox church and soon a flourishing
Greek school. Between 1786 and 1820, the ‘Greeks’ (i.e. Orthodox) in
Vienna grew from some 500 to 3000 or more, including many students
at the University. Many books in Greek were printed there and at
Leipzig (in addition to Venice and Trieste) — mostly concerned with
education and the useful arts. 1 Literate Greeks already had a language
descended from a common one (the Koine) which had once been the
lingua franca of the Byzantine world, though it had long given way to
popular spoken dialects. Italian was the commercial language of the
Levant, but in the eighteenth century the writing of pseudo-classical
Greek became an elegant accomplishment among the families of
Phanariots and prosperous merchants. But this did not imply any
political design for a violent overthrow of the Turkish empire, whose
loose and increasingly lax administration gave these men their oppor-
tunities. It was the French Revolution that gave a new edge to the
movement. Rhigas Pheraios (c. 1757-98), a Vlach bom at Velestino
(the ancient Pherae) in Thessaly, was not exactly a Greek nationalist.
After serving in the households of the Danubian hospodars in the 1780’s,
he settled in Vienna and produced a number of rousing translations and
poems, such as his famous Greek adaptation of the Marseillaise, dis-
tributed through his widely-ramified Hetairia, about which little is
known. He also edited a big map of Turkey in Europe. His professed
aim was a reconciliation of all its inhabitants, whatever their religion or
language, under the banner of the liberty and equality proclaimed by
the French. He had contacts with prominent Turks and Albanians,
and probably with Ali Pasha of Yanina, but most of his associates were
1 E. Turczynski, Die deutsch-griechischen Kulturbeziehungen bis zur Berufung Konig
Ottos (Munich, 1959). F. Valjave6, Geschichte der deutschen Kulturbeziehungen zu
Siidosteuropa (Munich, 1953).
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Greeks. Later, in 1797, while the French were revolutionising the Ionian
Islands, Rhigas set out for the Peloponnese, where he planned to start a
rising, but he was seized at Trieste with twelve chest-loads of pro-
clamations, convicted in Vienna and handed over with some of his
associates to the pasha of Belgrade for execution.
Adamantios Koraes (1748-1833) never returned to the Levant after
finally leaving his home at Smyrna at the age of thirty. After studying
medicine at Montpellier, he settled in Paris in 1788, embraced the cause
of the Revolution and devoted the rest of his fife to an ambitious work
of educating the Greek-speaking world to use a literary form which
would be neither a slavish imitation of ancient Greek nor a mere
adaptation of the spoken dialects. The resulting katharevousa (purified)
form was artificial and is now less in favour; but Koraes is rightly
honoured as architect of the written language generally used for a
century or more and still holding its own alongside the rival demotic
forms which have been enriched in imaginative literature out of the
vernacular. His patriotic, republican and anti-clerical opinions were
evident in the introductory dialogues to his editions of the ancient Greek
classics, whose publication and distribution (1805-17) were subsidised by
a wealthy merchant of Chios. Koraes declared, on the eve of the revolt,
that a violent solution was premature by a generation, and perhaps
eventually unnecessary; but his occasional anonymous poems and tracts
were virtually calls to insurrection, and, once it had begun, he gave it
countenance. A scholar, not a politician, he was apt both to under-rate
the role of the Orthodox Church in Greek national life, and also to over-
rate the timeliness of a republican and democratic constitution for the
new Greece. His earlier respect for Capodistrias gave way to bitter
and unjustified accusations of tyranny in his rule over Greece.
Koraes was part-founder of a Greek literary and patriotic periodical,
published in Vienna (1811-21) and subsidised by the Danubian
Hospodars. This in turn was connected with the Society of Friends of
the Muses, which was patronised by the tsar and Capodistrias at Vienna
in 1814-15 and became a fashionable charity whose proceeds were used
for bringing young Greeks to Europe. It had no traceable connexion
with the political and at first secret society Philike Hetairia, whose
directing spirits and travelling agents were neither fashionable nor
highly educated. The three men who founded this Hetairia at Odessa
in the summer of 1814 also had connexions with Ali Pasha’s Epirus,
a region which in turn had contacts with the French during their
occupations of the Ionian Islands and of the Adriatic coast further
north. The Metropolitan Ignatius (p. 535) may have been a link between
the two societies. 1 A surviving register of some 550 enrolments in the
1 For further details and references, see the writer’s article on ‘Capodistrias and the
Greeks before 1821 ’ in Cambridge Historical Journal, xin, 2 (1957).
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Hetairia shows that, after very slow growth till 1818, membership
spread rapidly from the lower Danube into Greece, especially among
men occupied in commerce or shipping. From the end of 1819, if not
earlier, the register is unreliable; the trickle became a stream and soon
a flood.The society’s existence was hardly a secret any longer and by
1821 it was merged in the general movement. Obscure in origin, and
the symptom rather than the cause of a revolutionary temper, the
society attracted men both by its confident promises of Russian armed
support and by its use of dramatically secret procedures borrowed from
masonic clubs. The names of the leaders (the Arche) were unknown
to the travelling agents and their recruits, who vaguely supposed that the
direction was both Russian and exalted. Many believed, wrongly, that
the tsar’s minister Capodistrias was at its head. When he positively
refused to be implicated, the direction was accepted (June 1820) by
Alexander Hypsilantes (pp. 538-9), who stipulated for sole command.
Neglecting advice and creating distrust by changing his plans, he was mis-
led into making his major thrust in the Principalities, leaving other
agents to stir up the Peloponnese and Islands. Without any official
encouragement, Hypsilantes may have persuaded himself that
Alexander I was only waiting for a spontaneous act of insurrection or
at least would then be obliged to step in and save it from collapse. In
the long run, he was not far wrong, but that was due, not to his own
reckless enterprise, which was publicly disavowed by the tsar, but to the
decisive action of some of the chieftains and clergy of the Peloponnese,
to the folly of the Turks and to their preoccupation with Ali Pasha,
already a declared rebel.
In April 1821 a widespread but ill co-ordinated rising in the
Peloponnese began hesitantly, but soon a great number of Turks had
been killed. This news, on top of Hypsilantes’ adventure in the north,
intensified Turkish reprisals, including the execution of the Patriarch
at Constantinople. This in turn led to the departure of the Russian
ambassador and a formal rupture of relations. For the next four years
the other Powers did their best to prevent the revolt in Greece from
becoming the occasion of a general attack by Russia uponTurkey, which
might be followed by an upheaval all over Europe. At first they were
successful. Capodistrias, now an embarrassment to the tsar, went into
retirement at Geneva (July 1822) and for five years confined his activities,
at least in public, to relief work. England, no less than Austria, was
anxious to keep the tsar quiet; but, whereas Metternich hoped at first to
see the revolt suppressed, Canning began to see an opportunity either
of intervening alone to England’s advantage or else of joining hands
with the tsar in order to keep some control over the issue. In either
case, the Greeks were likely to profit. In spite of personal, sectional and
regional quarrels, much savage cruelty and great lack of discipline, the
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Greeks had brave soldiers and skilful sailors. The failure of the Turks
to reconquer the Peloponnese must be ascribed to shortage of men
(owing to commitments elsewhere), jealousy between commanders and
inability to secure their communications either by sea against the Greek
ships under Andreas Miaoules or by land against guerrilla harryings in
the passes. During every respite, the Greek leaders quarrelled, twice to
the point of civil war. An Assembly, not recognised by rival bodies,
produced a little-heeded ‘Constitution of Epidauros’, and elected the
Phanariot Alexander Mavrocordatos as president. The fighting men
resented the formation of a regular government, but the ‘European’
Greeks had on their side the wealthy islanders, the European committees
which were collecting funds (in England chiefly under Byron’s influence
and Benthamite management), and also most of the Philhellenes in
Greece. These groups held the purse-strings, and by the end of 1824
their influence seemed to be well established.
Meanwhile, the sultan purchased the help of his nominal vassal, the
Pasha of Egypt (p. 534) by allowing him to subdue and occupy Crete and
by promising further rewards for the conquest of the Peloponnese.
Miaoules was no longer in a position to deny the sea passages to their
combined fleets. Early in 1825, the pasha’s son, Ibrahim, landed an
Arab army of more than 10,000 men and soon overran a great part of the
Peloponnese, without however being strong enough (or perhaps con-
fident enough of the future) to reduce it systematically. Nauplia, the
temporary Greek capital, was saved; the nearby islands of Hydra and
Spezzia (the richest and most active of them all) were still unsubdued;
north of the Isthmus Missolonghi held out in the west until April 1826,
more than two years after Byron’s death there, and in Attica the arrival
of the French Philhellene Fabvier helped to postpone the surrender of the
Acropolis until June 1827. At the eleventh hour, the provisional govern-
ment had just agreed (April 1 827) on a compromise between the factions :
the ‘Russian’ party of Kolokotrones and other chieftains was satisfied
by the election, with general consent, of Capodistrias as president for
seven years; the choice of the philhellene soldier Sir Richard Church
and the wayward Admiral Lord Cochrane to command the Greek
forces on land and sea was a concession to the ‘English’ party of the
islanders and some of the notables; the ‘French’ party of Kolettes,
whose support came mainly from north of the Isthmus, was propitiated
by the publication in May of the extremely democratic ‘Constitution
of Troezen’. By this time, the prospect of foreign intervention was at
last taking shape.
The war of independence could not have been won by the Greeks
without foreign intervention; but, equally, the movement could hardly
have been suppressed if the Powers had held aloof. Intervention was
brought about partly by the deadlock which threatened constant dis-
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turbance and piracy in the Aegean, partly by the desire to forestall
Russia, and more indefinably by the interest of classically-educated
Europeans (including even the critics of philhellenic sentiment) in a
country which seemed familiar to them in a way that Serbia and
Roumania were not. Before his death in December 1825, Tsar
Alexander I had already ceased to discuss the eastern question with his
continental allies, and leaned towards an actively Russian policy which
his successor Nicholas I was to pursue more resolutely. Canning dis-
liked the double prospect of Egyptian rule in the Peloponnese and
Greek piracy in the Aegean, but he was hardly in a position to move
alone in response to the appeal of some Greek leaders for British
protection (June 1825). The upshot was the Protocol signed by the
Duke of Wellington at St Petersburg on 4 April 1826. The two govern-
ments agreed to impose on both parties, by means of joint or separate
negotiation, a settlement giving to the Greeks, within unspecified
boundaries, an autonomous but tributary status, with compensation for
Turkish proprietors. On 29 April, after the fall of Missolonghi, the
Greek Assembly made a formal request for mediation on this basis,
but staked out claims for inclusion of many regions which had hardly
taken up arms during the revolt. Even before the Protocol was signed,
the new tsar sent an ultimatum to the sultan, requiring negotiation on
outstanding Russo-Turkish disputes; the resulting Convention of
Akkerman (October 1826) was a diplomatic success for Russia but made
no such stipulations for the Greeks as it did for the Roumanians and
Serbians. The Bourbon government of France, to whom a section of the
Greeks had also appealed, desired to share, not in a revolution but in a
crusade. This prolonged but enlarged the negotiations.
The tripartite Treaty of London (6 July 1 827), signed during Canning’s
brief premiership, added little to the substance of the Protocol, but an
additional article provided for sending a joint fleet to Greek waters to
enforce an armistice on both parties — ‘without however taking any
part in the hostilities’. Both parties accepted the armistice, but neither
fully observed it. George Canning died in August, but his cousin
Stratford Canning, ambassador at Constantinople, who had met
Mavrocordatos eighteen months earlier, went a little beyond his
instructions by referring in a private letter to cannon-shot as the final
arbiter; this was repeated by Admiral Codrington to his captains. Thus
the Cabinets avoided direct responsibility for the decisive conflict in the
Bay of Navarino on 20 October 1827, when the Turkish and Egyptian
fleets were destroyed by the naval squadrons of England, Russia and
France; Metternich might speak of a ‘frightful catastrophe’, and
Wellington, who came into office in January 1828, of an ‘untoward
event’; but the three ambassadors had already left Constantinople, and
England was not released from her obligations under the Treaty even if
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Russia should separately pursue the quarrel to the point of war with
Turkey. The Egyptians soon evacuated the Peloponnese, after a mere
show of resistance to a French force which arrived in the name of the
three Powers and stayed there for five years (1828-33). But the sultan
would not yield. He had denounced the Treaty of Akkerman and almost
invited the Russian declaration of war (April 1828); nothing but a
disastrous second campaign forced him to accede to the Treaty of
London as part of the peace- treaty signed at Adrianople (14 September
1829) in the presence of a Russian army. 1
The future status and the frontiers of Greece were still undetermined.
Wellington, like Mettemich, thought that a small independent state
under a European sovereign would be less open to Russian influence
than a larger but tributary territory. As president, Capodistrias was
unjustly suspected by England and France of being a tool of the tsar.
His services to Greece have been under-rated in the past and perhaps
overmuch idealised by Greeks more recently. It was his misfortune that
in attempting a necessary period of personal rule, he had not sufficient
means to enforce it and was too contemptuous of local spirit : faction
culminated in his assassination (October 1831), and near-anarchy
followed. Meanwhile Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, soon to be the
first King of the Belgians, accepted and then declined the throne of
Greece (February-May 1830); it was welcomed in May 1832 by King
Louis I of Bavaria, an enthusiastic philhellene, for his younger son Otho,
then aged seventeen. Wellington wanted at first to liberate only the
Peloponnese and the lesser islands, but the three ambassadors from
Constantinople, in conference at Poros, had recommended (December
1828) a more generous settlement, and European opinion could not
conceive Greece without Athens at least. The northern frontier offered
to Leopold in 1830 was enlarged for Otho in 1832 by Palmerston’s
inclusion of Acarnania in the west. Among the islands, the ambassadors
had proposed to include both Samos and Crete, but Palmerston in
office could not or would not reverse the contrary decision of 1830,
which he had criticised in opposition. Samos obtained, and Chios
recovered, a tolerably autonomous status until their union with Greece
in 1913. Crete was restored to the sultan in 1840 after fifteen years of
Egyptian rule; two generations of periodical risings passed before the
Turkish garrison was removed in 1898, and full union with Greece
followed in 1912.
News of the Treaty of Adrianople caused a momentary panic in
western chanceries, but in fact its terms were not alarming except as an
omen for the future. The Russian army was exhausted, and could
hardly have seized the capital, nor did the tsar desire it. He had already
1 For an account of the international aspects of the Greek question, see Chapter xxv,
pp. 673-4, 677-9. 685-9.
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approved a report of a powerful Committee of his Council, reaffirming
in effect the policy formulated by Czartoryski twenty-five years earlier,
namely to avoid or postpone the crucial question of the future of
Constantinople and the Straits by preserving the general framework of
Turkish power while exerting continuous pressure on the sultan in
furtherance of Russian interests in detail. This was not unlike the
British, French or Austrian conception of the ‘independence and
integrity’ of Turkey, with the big exception that Russia’s desires to
expand into Asia, to open the door to the Mediterranean and to live
up to her reputation as an Orthodox Empire must inevitably erode the
principle of preservation and might ultimately explode it at some great
opportunity. Whatever her intention might be, Russia had not the
power, in 1829 or even in 1878, to seek alone a radical solution — and in
1918 it was not under Russian pressure that the remnants of Turkey in
Europe were detached. Yet the terms that Russia was able to impose
at Adrianople in 1829 did mark an irreversible step in the history of not
only Greece but the future Roumania. The Greek revolt and the
example of Muhammad Ali also provoked the first decisive step in
Turkey towards internal revival — Mahmud II’s destruction of the
Janissaries in June 1826, known in Turkey as the ‘auspicious incident’.
‘The first explosion of Greek nationalism kindled the first spark of its
Turkish counterpart.’ 1 But it was not until they had lost their foothold
in Europe nearly a century later that the Turks appeared to others or even
to themselves as a ‘nation rightly struggling to be free’. To the sultan
in 1830, political nationalism and its friends seemed as dangerous as
they did to Mettemich; in the eyes of Europe, the sultan was either
an uncouth and savage tyrant, deserving no sympathy, or else an
exasperatingly lethargic ally.
1 A. J. Toynbee, A Study of History (abridged), p. 132.
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T hese were years when the boundaries of British rule were
extended while its impact was intensified. New territory was
acquired, both in India and outside it, while the activities of
government advanced beyond the maintenance of order and the
collection of revenue to economic and social policies that accorded with
European ideas of utility and morality. Exaggerated fears of a revival of
French power in Asia were at first associated with this territorial ex-
pansion, and the desire for a strong ally against a resurgent France was
the main reason why the British allowed the Dutch to return to South-
East Asia after the Napoleonic Wars. But the major concern of the
English East India Company was now the establishment of its authority
as the paramount power in India. Mughal supremacy had been little
more than nominal after the death of Aurangzib, the last of the great
emperors, in 1707, and the Maratha confederacy lacked the unity of
direction and the centralised administrative system necessary for
dominance over the sub-continent. Widespread disorder and devasta-
tion in central India, spreading to the borders of British territory,
indicated the need for some paramount authority. Indian considerations
thus brought the English Company to grips with the Marathas. Apart
from arousing occasional suspicions of Russian designs, European
politics were henceforth of diminishing importance in the shaping of its
external policies.
European ideas, on the other hand, were of increasing importance
in the development of internal policy. True, the defects that had arisen
in the administrative institutions established by Lord Cornwallis in
Bengal suggested that he had paid too little attention to Indian ideas and
circumstances, and the reforms that were in train elsewhere made more
use of local experience by modifying the rigidity of his separation of
powers, by giving more responsibility to native officials, and by settling
the land revenue with villages and with individual cultivators instead of
with great landholders. But these new methods of settlement also
accorded well with European economic notions. James Mill at the
East-India House, Munro in Madras, Colebrooke in Ceylon, Van
Hogendorp and Raffles in Java — all thought that they were turning
custom-ridden serfs into industrious peasant-cultivators, responsive to
economic rather than ‘feudal’ stimuli. In fact, the immediate result of
the introduction of cash rents and of private property in land was often
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to deliver the cultivator into the hands of the moneylender. The
establishment of freer trade, both external and internal, similarly
tended to benefit the merchant rather than the local artisan who found
it difficult to compete with the machines of Europe. But in cities like
Calcutta and Bombay this same commercial class, together with the
lawyers and officials nurtured by the new institutions of government,
proved particularly sympathetic to European ideas and to social
reforms based upon them. It was, perhaps, in social policies that
European ideas had the most influence, as the British took to en-
couraging the diffusion of ‘useful’ knowledge and to discouraging
customs like suttee. Also, wherever British rule was introduced,
punishments such as torture and mutilation were abolished, and
attempts were made to suppress bribery and corruption. There was a
feeling of progress in official circles — a sense of confidence in the power
of European ideas to free the people of Asia from outworn usages and
superstitions. The Indian ideas that had seemed to Warren Hastings and
his colleagues to be so worthy of study were now condemned as ungodly
by Evangelicals or despised as inefficient by Utilitarians. The transla-
tions and researches undertaken by Sir William Jones, Charles Wilkins
and the other pioneers of the Asiatic Society of Bengal now seemed to
arouse more interest in Germany than in England, and Friedrich
Schlegel hoped that the study of Indian literature would stimulate a
second renaissance in Europe. Macaulay, on the other hand, thought
that English education would engender a renaissance in India.
Among the factors governing British expansion, fear of a revival of
French power in India was most apparent under Wellesley, who
became governor-general in 1798. His fears were shared by Dundas,
the President of the Board of Control in London, who sent reinforce-
ments to India when he heard of Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition.
Wellesley was concerned not only with the possibility of a French
invasion but also with the reality of French intrigues with local rulers.
He knew that Tipu Sultan of Mysore had sent to Mauritius for military
help, that the French governor had called for volunteers, and that some
had come forward. This seemed all the more ominous in view of the
threatened invasion from the north-west by Zaman Shah of Afghanistan,
with whom Wellesley thought that Tipu had some understanding.
Wellesley also saw danger in the many French soldiers of fortune who
were still to be found in the service of different Indian rulers. He was
particularly wary of the French-trained troops of the Nizam of
Hyderabad, and soon persuaded him to conclude a treaty of alliance
against Tipu, whereby he agreed to disband them and to accept and
pay for a force of the Company’s troops in their place. Tipu himself
was then asked to dispense with French help, but seemed unwilling to
comply. After some inconclusive correspondence, British troops entered
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Mysore. The war was short and decisive. Tipu was killed in the taking
of his capital, Seringapatam, and his kingdom lay at Wellesley’s dis-
posal. Part of it, including the sea coast, was kept by the Company,
part was handed over to the Nizam as an ally’s reward, though he had
done little enough to deserve it, and the remainder was restored to the
old Hindu dynasty from which Tipu’s father, Haidar Ali, had taken it.
At the same time, the new ruler was placed firmly under the Company’s
control in a subsidiary alliance: he agreed to accept a force of the
Company’s troops and to pay an annual subsidy for them, and he
promised to have no relations with any other state without the
Company’s approval.
Subsidiary alliances of this type became a means of extending
British control over other states and eventually of establishing British
paramountcy over the whole of the Indian subcontinent. Rulers in
difficulty would be offered the Company’s protection against enemies
abroad or rebels at home in return for the stationing of a force of the
Company’s troops within their territories, the payment of an annual
subsidy and the renunciation of any independent foreign policy. In
practice, the payment of the annual subsidy was sometimes delayed and
aroused much altercation. An additional refinement was to require the
cession of territory instead. These features may be seen in the subsidiary
alliance concluded with the Nizam in 1800, when he was obliged to
cede to the Company the territories he had so recently acquired from
Mysore.
Oudh was already linked with the Company in such an alliance when
the possibility of an Afghan invasion prompted Wellesley to demand
an increase in the size of the subsidiary force, to meet the cost of which
the Nawab had to cede extensive territories. The result of these cessions
was that Oudh was surrounded by British territory — except for its
border with Nepal — and therefore had no need of such an increase in
the subsidiary force. Moreover, by the time that these lengthy and
acrimonious negotiations were concluded, the Afghan danger no longer
existed, for Sikh hostility and a lack of funds had already forced Zaman
Shah to withdraw. The growth of British power in India was now a more
important aim than the defence of the Company’s possessions against
foreign invasion.
The Maratha confederacy remained the only formidable power con-
fronting the Company. Never tightly organised, its structure now
seemed threatened by the dissensions of its leaders. The Peshwa, who
had usurped the power of the Raja of Satara though still professing to
be his chief minister, was losing control over the great military chiefs,
such as Sindia and Holkar, who were becoming independent territorial
princes. Such a situation invited British intervention. Wellesley was
also encouraged by his suspicions of French influence. The forces
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which the military adventurer de Boigne had raised for Mahadji
Sindia had been of great service in the establishment of the latter’s
power in Northern India, which extended to the control of Delhi, the
city of the Mughal emperor. In return, extensive territories based on
Agra had been assigned to de Boigne, and after his return home in
1795 his forces and territories had been entrusted to another such
adventurer, one General Perron. Eight years later, Wellesley was still
troubled by reports of de Boigne’s influence with Napoleon. Holkar,
moreover, had followed Sindia’s example by engaging yet another
French adventurer. If the instability of Maratha politics provided ample
opportunity for British intervention, these indications of French in-
fluence provided Wellesley with ample justification for it.
That instability was accentuated by the accession of three reckless
and inexperienced rulers within the same decade. Daulat Rao Sindia
succeeded Mahadji on the latter’s death in 1794. In 1796 a new Peshwa,
Baji Rao, came to power, and quickly showed his impatience of the
restraining hand of Nana Phadnis, the minister who had dominated the
politics of Poona for the last quarter of the century and who himself
died in 1800. Finally, the death of Tukoji Holkar in 1797 was followed
by a struggle for the inheritance in which the young Jaswant Rao
emerged as the ablest but also the most restless member of the family.
When Mahadji Sindia had come south to gain influence at Poona, Nana
had encouraged Holkar to make trouble for him in the north. Baji
Rao, on the other hand, allowed the young Daulat Rao Sindia a free
hand at Poona and then provoked Jaswant Rao Holkar’s enmity. But
Daulat Rao proved an unworthy successor to Mahadji Sindia, and was
unable to protect the Peshwa from Holkar’s vengeance. Baji Rao fled to
Bassein in December 1802 to seek the help that Wellesley was eager to
give. In return for British protection against enemies abroad and rebels
at home Baji Rao promised to have no relations with other powers
without the Company’s knowledge and agreed to the presence of a
subsidiary force, to pay for which he had to cede some territory. He
was duly restored to Poona in May 1803, but Sindia was unwilling for
the British to gain such influence there and was at war with them in
August. It was soon apparent that the French danger had again been
exaggerated. Perron offered no resistance when the British seized
Aligarh, with its arsenal and treasury; then he accepted the British
offer of a safe-conduct and left for France, a very rich man. His
successor, Bourquin, only offered a feeble resistance when the British
advanced on Delhi. With the possession of that city, the Mughal
emperor passed under their protection. Such was Wellesley’s opinion,
though the emperor’s was that the Company had now returned to their
proper allegiance. Sindia also lost his control over the princes of
Rajputana, who passed under British protection. Moreover, he was
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forced to cede extensive territories in the north and west and to dismiss
his French staff. Finally, he was asked to accept a subsidiary force, but
at first refused. Distrust of Holkar soon caused him to change his
mind, however, and in February 1804 he accepted the protection of a
subsidiary force, while promising to have no relations with ‘any
principal States or powers’ without the Company’s knowledge. 1 The
British had once again been able to profit from Maratha disunity.
Meanwhile, Holkar had been preparing for a trial of strength with
the Company, and appealed to Sindia to join him. Sindia duly reported
this to the British, who were soon at war with Holkar. They might
well have found it difficult to tackle a united Maratha confederacy. As
it was, they were able to deal with their enemies one by one. Even so,
Holkar proved a formidable opponent. At the same time, growing
concern was being voiced in England at the successive wars in which
Wellesley had involved the Company. Nor had he tried to conciliate
or even to conceal his contempt for his critics. He had scarcely troubled
to keep the home authorities informed of his plans. He had felt con-
fident of the support of Dundas, the first President of the Board of
Control : he understood his ‘ voracious appetite for lands and fortresses ’. 2
But Castlereagh, who became President of the Board in 1802, proved to
be less enthusiastic for territorial expansion and more conscious of its
dangers. Moreover, the financial position of the Company had long
aroused concern and now seemed jeopardised by Wellesley’s policies.
Its Indian revenues were not meeting its expenditure, and its trade was
running at a loss. The exclusion of some of its European competitors
as a result of the Napoleonic war had provided an opportunity for in-
creasing its exports from India. The Court of Directors had therefore
been sending Wellesley no less than one million sterling a year, but he
had been spending it on his wars instead of on trade. Not only had he
offended the Directors in general by ignoring their administrative
authority and neglecting their commercial policy; he had also alienated
the powerful shipping interest by allowing India-built ships to carry
home the Company’s goods. Finally, it seemed that his Maratha policy
had involved the Company first in a war with Sindia and now in another
with Holkar, in which British troops had already suffered serious
reverses. The government could no longer withstand the Directors’
pressure for Wellesley’s recall. He therefore resigned in 1805 on learning
that the alternative was dismissal.
In the period of peace and retrenchment that followed, some of the
ground recently gained was deliberately relinquished. Conciliatory
1 Treaty of Burhanpur. As a concession to his susceptibilities, the subsidiary force was
to be stationed near his frontier, rather than within his territories.
* Wellesley to Dundas, 25 January 1800, quoted in C. H. Philips (ed.). Correspondence
of David Scott, vol. i (Royal Historical Society, Camden Third Series, vol. lxxv), (London,
1951), p. xx.
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terms were offered to Sindia as well as Holkar, and the protection that
the Company had promised the Rajput states was now withdrawn.
Those states were in effect abandoned to the demands of the Maratha
chiefs and to the depredations of their Pindari auxiliaries — freebooters
who may have had their uses in war but were the scourge of central
India in peace, their numbers swelling as those of more regular armies
were reduced. They were now beyond control, plundering and ravaging
over long distances. If the Company were to shrink from the assertion
of its power as the successor to the Mughals, there seemed to be no
prospect of law and order. The land would be devastated by marauders
or impoverished by the wars of petty princes. Even Ranjit Singh, who
had been building up Sikh power in the Panjab, was encouraged by the
Company’s passivity to advance beyond the Satlej in order to intervene
in the disputes of local chiefs. He could expect conciliatory treatment
from the British at a time when they were suspicious of French designs
upon India. But in 1809, when those suspicions had been allayed, the
Company decided to assert itself, and a display of force was enough to
persuade him to direct his energies elsewhere.
From the Company’s point of view, the subsidiary alliance remained
the most effective method of extending British influence without adding
to the British territories in India. But many officials thought that states
which had concluded such alliances were unlikely to prosper. Thomas
Munro was of this opinion:
There are many weighty objections to the employment of a subsidiary force. It has
a natural tendency to render the government of every country in which it exists,
weak and oppressive; to extinguish all honourable spirit among the higher classes
of society, and to degrade and impoverish the whole people. The usual remedy of a
bad government in India is a quiet revolution in the palace, or a violent one by
rebellion, or foreign conquests. But the presence of a British force cuts off every
chance of remedy, by supporting the prince on the throne against every foreign and
domestic enemy. It renders him indolent, by teaching him to trust to strangers for
his security; and cruel and avaricious, by showing him that he has nothing to fear
from the hatred of his subjects. 1
Nor did rulers find it easy to bear the restraints which a subsidiary
alliance imposed upon them. The Peshwa Baji Rao had been required,
in the treaty of Bassein, to renounce all relations with other powers
without the Company’s knowledge. He was soon informed that these
powers were deemed by the Company to include the other Maratha
rulers, such as Sindia and Holkar, whose nominal suzerain he had been.
The Company’s attitude was that the Maratha confederacy had been
‘dissolved’ as a result of the treaty of Bassein. Another source of
tension was the opportunity which the subsidiary alliance gave to the
Company’s residents to interfere in the internal affairs of the states to
1 Munro to governor-general, 12 August 1817. G. R. Gleig, Sir Thomas Munro (London,
1831), vol. u, pp. 7-8.
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which they were accredited. In the face of Baji Rao’s repeated demands
for the use of the subsidiary force against his overmighty subjects, the
great jagirdars (or landholders), Mountstuart Elphinstone arranged a
settlement at Pandharpur in 1812 by which they promised to serve the
Peshwa according to custom provided that he in turn respected their
customary rights, the British government standing as arbiter between
them. The resident was in effect protecting the jagirdars against their
own sovereign. When Baji Rao finally turned on the Company in 1817,
Elphinstone was soon able to detach most of the jagirdars from his
cause, and special consideration was accordingly shown to them after
the annexation of his territories by the British in the following year.
Baji Rao had attacked at a time when the Company was involved in
widespread operations against the Pindaris, whose activities were
threatening the prosperity of some of its own territories. These opera-
tions required a reconsideration of the Company’s relationship with the
other Maratha powers, who had connived at the Pindaris’ doings.
They were invited to help, but Holkar followed Baji Rao’s example and
was quickly defeated and obliged to sign a subsidiary treaty. Sindia,
in whose favour the British had, in 1805, renounced the right to make
treaties with the Rajput states, was now required to release them from
that pledge, besides promising them his full co-operation against the
Pindaris. The Pindari menace was soon eradicated, and the Rajput
states, which had suffered so much from Pindaris and Marathas alike,
were joined in alliance with the Company, acknowledging its supremacy
and promising to act in ‘subordinate co-operation’ with it at all times.
The Company was clearly the paramount power in India.
Beyond India, the Company’s advance had followed a similar pattern.
Suspicion of French designs was again the first consideration. Indeed,
towards local rulers the British were often much more circumspect
than they were towards their European rivals. The British conquest of
maritime Ceylon and of the other Dutch possessions in South and
South-East Asia followed quickly upon the French assumption of
control over Holland in 1795. Java still remained for a time in Dutch
hands, but it seemed of little economic value to the English Company
and the force that was eventually prepared for it was diverted to the
Red Sea after the French invasion of Egypt. However, its conquest
seemed the more necessary when the reforms of Marshal H. W.
Daendels, that loyal servant of Napoleon, had increased its military
strength and when the capture of Mauritius in 1810 had left it as the
only base for French frigates and privateers in search of British shipping
in Asian waters. Its occupation in the following year prompted the
formulation of extensive plans for economic and social reform, under
the inspiration of T. S. Raffles, as lieutenant-governor, but the British
desire for a strong Dutch ally against a resurgent France led to its
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return to Dutch rule in 1816. Unwilling for the British to abandon their
prospects in South-East Asia, Raffles established the English Company
at Singapore by setting up a rival to the Sultan of Johore and securing
formal permission from him. As part of a general settlement of differ-
ences in 1824, the Dutch recognised the British position in Singapore,
handed over Malacca and promised not to interfere in Malaya, while
the British handed over their establishments in Sumatra, and promised
not to interfere south of the Straits of Singapore. From Singapore and
Penang the British could dominate the Straits of Malacca and protect
the sea routes to China. Commerce rather than territory was their aim
in this area, but their nervous attempts to avoid entanglements with the
local rulers were unsuccessful. When they acquired Penang from the
Sultan of Kedah, it had been on the understanding that they would
protect him against Siam, but this they proved unwilling to do: on the
devastation of his country in 1821 all that he gained from them was
shelter in Penang itself. But Robert Fullerton, who became Governor
of Penang in 1824, found that a show of force was enough to protect
Selangor and Perak from Siam when the threat came. In spite of the
Calcutta Government’s reluctance to assume fresh responsibilities, the
Malay states gradually came to look upon the British as the paramount
power, reporting to them when one ruler succeeded another and relying
on them for protection in time of need. The old empire of Johore had
gone the way of the Mughal Empire of India. The authority of the one
sultan at Singapore was overshadowed by the British, while that of his
rival at Riau was overshadowed by the Dutch.
For all the Company’s reluctance to add to its territories in South-
East Asia, substantial gains were made nearer its Indian borders, and
in response to local pressure. In Ceylon, with the Company in possession
of the coast and the Kandyan kingdom isolated from the outside world,
the situation was delicate enough and there was ample provocation on
both sides. As in India, intrigues with rivals to the throne seemed the
most effective way to influence over the local government. British troops
duly installed a puppet as king in 1802, but left only a small and supine
garrison for his future support, with the result that he and they were
speedily despatched. However, the legitimate ruler proved harsh enough
to alienate the leading Kandyan chiefs and rash enough to provide the
British with ample justification for further interference, so that in 1815
a British force, acting with the connivance of the restive chiefs, suc-
ceeded in deposing him and annexing his kingdom. The whole of Ceylon
was now under British rule. (The Maritime Provinces had been trans-
ferred from Company to Crown rule in 1802.) Another mettlesome and
restless neighbour faced the British across the north-east frontier oflndia,
after the Burmese conquest of Arakan in 1785. The Burmese govern-
ment was ignorant of the Company’s strength but determined to pursue
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a spirited policy towards it. In the years that followed, relations were
troubled by Burmese protests against the shelter afforded to Arakanese
rebels and refugees in British territory, by successive Burmese invasions
of Assam and Manipur which occasioned further flights of refugees,
by Burmese threats against Cachar and by rumours of Burmese designs
on Bengal. The Burmese advance was unchecked by the declaration of a
British protectorate over Cachar but permanently halted by the ensuing
war, which won for the British the important coastal provinces of
Arakan and Tenasserim, as well as Assam.
These various conquests were, however, creating fresh problems of
administration. Wellesley, and many officials in Bengal, thought that
the system established there by Lord Cornwallis should be extended to
the Company’s other possessions. Cornwallis had, in 1793, confirmed
in perpetuity the revenue settlements made by the government with the
substantial landholders or zamindars — a term covering a variety of
persons from tax-farmers to the descendants of rajas. They were all
thereby made hereditary landlords at unchangeable rents. It was hoped
that they would be encouraged to undertake improvements by the
knowledge that any increase in productivity would benefit them rather
than attract heavier government demands upon them. At the same time,
security against illegal exactions was provided by a rigid separation of
powers between collectors and judges. With its detailed regulations,
this was intended to be a government of laws rather than of men. It
was also a European government, for Indians were confined to junior
and ill-paid posts. But all these features of the Cornwallis system were
now under attack.
The most serious criticisms were in fact made by the officials who had
been given the task of establishing that system in the Company’s new
territories. In the ceded and conquered provinces of Northern India,
for example, they protested that not enough was known either of the
resources of the land or of its proper owners for any permanent arrange-
ments to be made. Besides, a permanent settlement would be of no
benefit to the Company in the event of a rise in the productivity of the
soil or a fall in the value of money. Such arguments against permanency
were enough to convince the home government that future settlements
must allow of periodic revision. Whether they should be made with
zamindars was another matter of dispute. There was little to suggest
that the Cornwallis system had turned them into improving landlords.
On the contrary, its rigidity seemed to be making them more ruthless
with their tenants rather than more efficient in their methods: they had
found that, if the Company’s revenue demand could not be raised,
neither would it be lowered or postponed; and while some old families
were displaced, others had recourse to rack-renting and sub-letting.
Once land had become a saleable commodity, considerable changes of
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ownership seem to have taken place. Further research will have to be
devoted to this matter, but it seems probable that elsewhere in India,
with periodic revisions of the revenue settlement, the tendency to such
changes was all the greater, and that much land must have passed into
the hands of merchants, money-lenders and functionaries of the law
courts and revenue offices of the new regime. Such persons would have
been quick to take advantage of the strictness with which the Company’s
judges enforced the terms of mortgages and debtors’ bonds upon which
unlettered and unsuspecting landholders had placed their mark. But,
although the Company’s courts were too complicated and expensive
to serve the needs of villagers, local agencies of justice like village head-
men and arbitration tribunals were too informal and unsystematic to
be fitted into the Cornwallis system. Officials with utilitarian ideas
suspected that British rule was fostering the growth of a parasitic class
of rent-receivers, while those who saw a meritorious simplicity and
vigour in the ancient Indian village feared for the decline of its institu-
tions in an age of reforms and regulations.
In Northern India, revenue settlements were therefore made with
villages — often with a group of proprietors, sometimes with an in-
dividual headman; while in South India, under the influence of Thomas
Munro, settlements were made with the individual raiyats, or cultivators,
and more power was given to Indians, both to subordinate judges and
to village headmen and tribunals. In Western India, under the influence
of Mountstuart Elphinstone, more care was taken to safeguard social
privilege. Unlike Munro, with his lengthy experience of settling the
revenue and understanding the problems of cultivators, Elphinstone’s
duties as resident at Poona had brought him into close contact with the
ruling classes of the Maratha Empire and had given him some insight
into their difficulties on the establishment of British rule. Not only did
he realise the political importance of conciliating an aristocracy which
had preserved its influence among the people: he also objected on
principle to the ‘levelling’ tendencies that he detected both in the
judicial and administrative arrangements of the Cornwallis system and
also in Munro’s determination to make his revenue settlements with the
peasants and his tendency to ignore the rights of other classes. He there-
fore made special provision to safeguard the feelings of the ruling
classes of the old Maratha Empire. The sardars, or great men, were
divided into three classes, each entitled to its own degree of preferential
treatment in the Company’s courts, while the greatest landholders
( jagirdars ) were allowed a free hand within their own estates. Care was
also taken to propitiate the Brahmans in view of the privileges that they
had lost with the fall of the Hindu government and the authority that
they still retained over public opinion. A degree of judicial responsi-
bility was left with the village headmen and arbitration tribunals.
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Revenue settlements, too, were made with village headmen or joint
proprietors where this had formerly been the custom, as in parts of
Gujarat and the Konkan, though elsewhere settlement was made with
the cultivators themselves. But both Munro and Elphinstone found that
suitors seemed to prefer the speedy hearing offered by the Company’s
Indian judges to the dilatory proceedings of arbitration tribunals. Nor
could the village headmen either escape the definition, and thereby the
limitation, of their powers in the Company’s regulations or shield their
doings from the suspicious scrutiny of its collectors. In the general
reaction against the Cornwallis system, with its reliance on the separa-
tion of powers, the collector had been turned into a powerful, paternal-
istic figure, vested with the office of magistrate and with the control ol
the police, as well as with the allocation of the land-revenue demand ir
areas which had not been permanently settled.
Even under Elphinstone, the Company’s methods of government wen
much more systematic and impersonal than those of its predecessors
Definition and limitation of powers seemed an ominous threat to loca
influence and prestige ; so did the sight of high office going, not to men ol
high caste, but to a rapidly changing succession of foreigners. When Sii
John Malcolm, who succeeded Elphinstone as Governor of Bombay
received the great landholders at Poona in 1827 he found them alarmec
‘at the tendency of our system of rule to destroy all those distinction;
they cherish’, though he thought that there was ‘a better prospect ol
preserving a native aristocracy in this part of India than in any othei
quarter of our territories’. 1 But the aristocratic privileges erected in the
judicial system of Bombay were only sanctioned with great reluctance
by the Court of Directors, and Utilitarians like James Mill were
already arguing that the Company should act as the sole landlord ant:
appropriate the whole economic rent of the soil, to the end that £
parasitic landlord class would be unable to exist. Such a principle,
though never strictly enforced, was used to justify burdensome assess-
ments equivalent to a half or even two-thirds of the estimated nel
produce. Attempts were also made, in the revenue settlements of the
North-Western Provinces, to supersede aristocratic claims, where the}
existed, in favour of the village community. T. C. Robertson, whc
became lieutenant-governor there after serving in Bengal, was shockec
at such ‘a fearful experiment’, which threatened so to ‘flatten the whole
surface of society as eventually to leave little of distinguishable eminence
between the ruling power and the cultivators of the soil’. 2 But sucl
policies did not prevent the steady transfer of land on mortgage fron
impecunious cultivators to prudent moneylenders. Meanwhile, the
1 Minute, 16 January 1828. Bombay Judicial Consultations, 30 January 1828, p. 31.
* T. C. Robertson, Minute, 15 April 1842, quoted in E. T. Stokes, The English Utilitarian,
and India (Oxford, 1959), pp. 115-16.
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abolition of the myriad duties on internal trade and transit went further
to benefit the commercial classes. All this seemed to accord with the
best economic principles.
James Mill himself claimed that under such a system ‘the wants of the
state are supplied really and truly without taxation’, simply by trans-
ferring the rent from an idle class of landlords to the Company. 1
In fact, however, high assessment was a recurrent defect of the Com-
pany’s periodic revenue settlements. Nor were the cultivators in
happier circumstances in the areas under permanent zamindari settle-
ment. Cornwallis, from his experience of a Bengal still recovering from
the effects of a disastrous famine, had assumed that the zamindars,
needing tenants, must treat them liberally; but this motive no longer
operated as population grew along with ordered government, while
customary obligations were difficult to enforce through the Company’s
law courts and were lightly regarded. The political economists held that
the free play of economic forces elsewhere must bring increased pro-
duction, benefiting the most efficient members of the community; but
the merchants and moneylenders seemed to be in fact the chief bene-
ficiaries and to be no more likely to initiate agricultural improvements
than the zamindars had been.
In the maritime provinces of Ceylon, the establishment of British
rule was soon followed by the curtailment of the privileges and authority
of the chiefs and headmen. But after the conquest of Kandy, special
consideration was shown to the local chiefs who had helped in that
operation, until their rebellion in 1818 decided the government to
restrict their authority also. Even so, the institutions of the Kandyan
provinces left them a privileged position, especially in the administra-
tion of justice, but a greater uniformity was introduced after the
Benthamite recommendations of the Colebrooke-Cameron Com-
mission in 1832. A further step was taken towards equality before the
law when the government renounced its right to exact forced labour
from certain castes. When recommending this reform, Colebrooke
had pointed to the headmen’s propensity not only to divert such
labour to their private purposes but also to charge for excusing in-
dividuals from their liability. A belief in economic incentives also lay
behind the measure — and behind the policy of abolishing service
tenures and of exacting payment of land revenue in cash rather than
in kind.
There was talk of similar reforms in Java in the last painful decade
of the Dutch Company’s existence. Dirk van Hogendorp, who had
become acquainted with the ideas behind the Cornwallis system while
1 James Mill, evidence before Select Committee on Affairs of East India Company,
2August 1831, Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons , 1831, v, (65), p. 292. Stokes, op.
cit. p. 91.
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serving in the Dutch factory at Patna, argued that the forced delivery
of produce in kind to the Company and the policy of governing through
the regents, or chiefs, left the people without the economic incentives
and security from oppression that were needed for higher productivity.
But the opposition was too strong. Even Daendels, who sympathised
with many of the new ideas, thought that the people were too lazy for a
free economy, and he extended the system of enforcing the delivery of
produce, with the result that the government stores were filled with
coffee that could not be exported because of the blockade. At the same
time, with a truly Napoleonic desire for centralised authority, he tried
to turn the regents into government officials and to impose Dutch
supremacy more firmly on the princes. These centralising policies were
continued by Raffles, who thought that there was a ‘propensity inherent
in every native authority to abuse its influence, and to render it oppressive
to the population at large’. 1 But if he distrusted the ‘privileged classes’
he found in the peasantry the simple virtues that appealed to adminis-
trators of the Munro school. With the help of H. W. Muntinghe, a
Dutch official who had been influenced by van Hogendorp, he intro-
duced a land revenue system based at first on settlements with the
village headmen and subsequently on settlements with the individual
cultivators. This could be expected to forward the development of a
cash economy suited more to the needs of English industrialists in
search of export markets than to those of Dutch traders in search of
colonial produce. Nevertheless the land-rent system was continued by
the Dutch on their return to Java. But it did not prove remunerative
enough to meet their financial needs, which were increased by the costs
of the Java War of 1825-30 — a revolt led by Dipa Nigara, a prince who
thought that he had been cheated of his inheritance. Nor was Dutch
trade meeting British competition, in spite of the foundation, in 1825,
of a state trading corporation, the Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij.
Johannes van den Bosch, who became governor-general in 1830, was
therefore entrusted with the task of economic reform. If he did not think
that the peasants were too lazy for freedom, neither did he think that
freedom would necessarily teach them how best to employ their labour.
He concluded that guidance — or compulsion — would be needed to
enlighten them, and decreed that the state could require the cultivation
of a specified area with a specified crop in place of the payment of rent
in cash. This, the so-called ‘Culture System’, involved a degree of
paternalistic control which had been absent from the Company’s
system of enforcing the delivery of produce no matter how cultivated.
The co-operation of the regents was all the more necessary to its success,
and much of their old authority was therefore restored. Not all of it,
however: the reforms of Daendels and Raffles were not entirely
1 Raffles, History of Java (2nd ed.) (London, 1830), vol. 1, p. xxxvn.
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obliterated. Nor was the Culture System a mere return to the policies
of the old Company, though the new state trading corporation was
entrusted with the resulting exports. Methods were improved, new crops
were introduced, and productivity in general was increased. But guid-
ance became control, and the government became all the more pre-
occupied with Java, to the neglect of the other Dutch possessions.
The English East India Company had meanwhile been fighting a
losing battle for its commercial privileges. The forces behind the
changing current of British trade with Asia were too strong for it. The
motive underlying much of the opposition to the renewal of its charter
in 1793 was no doubt the traditional fear of competition from its exports
of Indian silks, muslins and cottons. But its European markets were
already being invaded by English machine-made cottons, and when the
renewal of its charter had again to be considered in 1813 the opposition
was concerned more with the idea that its monopoly of the trade with
India and China was an obstacle to the development of Asian markets
for English goods. It was therefore deprived of the Indian monopoly in
1813 and of the Chinese in 1833. It soon found itself unable to compete
with private traders, while Indian handicrafts proved equally helpless
before English factory-made goods. But it fostered the production of
raw materials, and with the help of private traders India continued to
export commodities such as cotton, silk, saltpetre and indigo in consider-
able quantities. Penang proved a useful channel through which Indian
goods flowed into South-East Asia, and its proximity to the Coromandel
coast was an encouragement to the enterprise of Indian merchants.
The establishment of Singapore facilitated the circulation of English
piecegoods in the same area, but a steady flow of Indian trade continued.
At the beginning of this period, silver was still being sent from England
and Bengal to help pay for the Company’s growing exports of tea from
China. But the gap was soon filled by increasing amounts of Indian
opium and cotton; with the result that the terms of trade had been
reversed by the second decade of the nineteenth century, and it was
China that had to export treasure to meet her adverse balance of pay-
ments. The cultivation of export crops also received official encourage-
ment both in Ceylon and in Java. The conquest of Kandy in 1815 and
the large-scale building of roads in the 1820’s were followed by the
development of coffee-growing on a plantation basis in Ceylon, while
in Java the culture system enabled the Dutch to promote with vigour
the production of commodities such as indigo, cotton and sugar.
While the English Company was thus losing its commercial functions,
it was being forced to take a more active part in social reform. The
Charter Act of 1813 which ended its Indian trade monopoly also pro-
vided for the freer entry of missionaries and for the promotion of
education. The Company had hitherto been so careful to conciliate
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Hindu and Muslim susceptibilities that the Baptist missionary William
Carey and his colleagues had been forced to take refuge in the Danish
settlement at Serampur. There were Evangelicals like Charles Grant
among the directors, but they had been able to do little more than
secure the appointment of like-minded clergymen to vacancies in the
Company’s establishment of chaplains. As proof of the need for
caution their opponents had cited the Vellore Mutiny of 1806, when
regulations framed to promote uniformity in attire and appearance were
resented by the sepoys as an attack on their religion. But the methods
that had been used with such effect in the agitation against the slave
trade were again brought to bear upon the government; meetings were
held and petitions were drawn up, while Wilberforce and his colleagues
of the Clapham sect called upon influential persons. It was therefore
provided that, if the Court of Directors rejected an application for per-
mission to travel to India, the Board of Control could overrule them.
There was little further attempt to restrain the missionaries from going
wherever they wished, but the Company still tried to maintain an attitude
of religious neutrality, while its officials continued to pay their tradi-
tional courtesies to the religions of the country and to levy the tradi-
tional taxes upon pilgrims. However, missionary and evangelical
pressure forced the home government to issue a declaration, in 1833, to
the effect that the Company must withdraw from all such connection
with religion. The abolition of the pilgrim tax seems to have been
followed by an increase in the number of pilgrims to Hindu shrines. This
was hardly in accordance with the expectations of the missionaries who
had assumed that such shrines derived prestige and popularity from their
connection with the state. To disentangle the government from the
management of lands and property assigned to religious purposes
proved more difficult. This problem became particularly acute in the
following decade in Ceylon, where a missionary campaign against the
state’s connection with ‘idolatry’ compelled the governor to relinquish
such duties as the appointment of Buddhist priests and the manage-
ment of the Temple of the Tooth at Kandy. The missionaries also
campaigned for other objects, notably for the abolition of suttee in
British India. They collected statistics, published gruesome descriptions
of the ceremony and searched the sacred literature of the Hindus for
texts to prove that the practice was not compulsory. The government,
deterred by fear of public resentment, especially from the high caste
sepoys of the Bengal army, tried at first merely to enforce the restrictions
prescribed by the Hindu texts: when a suttee was announced, the
Company’s officials were supposed to ascertain that the widow made a
voluntary and responsible decision to mount the pyre. But it was soon
suggested that the presence of officials merely encouraged the practice;
moreover, the opinion was growing among them too that suttee could
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be prohibited without political danger. Careful enquiry convinced
Lord William Bentinck, the governor-general, that this was so, and in
1829 suttee was prohibited by law in the territories under the Bengal
government. 1
Much missionary labour was devoted to education, for it was widely
held that the spreading of Western knowledge would weaken faith in
Hinduism and thus prepare the way for Christianity as well as for
further social reform. The Charter Act of 1813 provided that at least
one lakh of rupees from the surplus revenues of the Company’s terri-
tories should be applied each year ‘to the revival and improvement of
literature and the encouragement of the learned natives of India, and
for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences
among the inhabitants of British India’. 2 But such phrases invited con-
troversy. Some officials thought that the Company should promote the
revival of the traditional learning of the country. This was objection-
able to missionaries and evangelicals because of its associations with
Hinduism or Islam, and to utilitarians because of its associations with
religion as such. James Mill himself had much to do with the writing
of a despatch which declared, in 1824, that the government’s aim should
be to teach not Hindu or Muslim learning but ‘useful learning’ — in
other words, western knowledge. 3 The language of instruction aroused
further controversy. Sanskrit, the traditional language of Hindu learn-
ing, seemed objectionable because it was a dead language, a difficult
language and the sacred language of Hinduism. Persian, the language
of the old Mughal government, was foreign to both rulers and ruled.
The vernaculars were many and local: to translate English books into
all of them would have been a long, costly and complicated operation.
It seemed more economical to teach Indians to read English books.
Bentinck himself considered that ‘the British language’ was ‘the key
to all improvements’. In a sarcastic minute Macaulay ridiculed the
claims of Indian languages and oriental learning in general, and sug-
gested that the result of teaching English to the people of India might
well be a Renaissance there: ‘what the Greek and Latin were to the
contemporaries of More and Ascham, our tongue is to the people of
India’. 4 The governor-general in council therefore resolved, in 1835,
‘that the great object of the British Government ought to be the
promotion of European literature and science among the natives of
India; and that all the funds appropriated for the purpose of education
would be best employed on English education alone’. 5 This was an
1 The Madras and Bombay governments followed suit in 1830.
* 53 Geo. Ill c. clv.
• Despatch to Bengal, 18 February 1824.
4 Minute, 2 February 1835. H. Sharp (ed.). Selections from Educational Records, vol. I,
pp. 107 ff.
6 Resolution, 7 March 1835. Sharp, op. cit., p. 130.
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extreme position, and a degree of official support was soon restored to
Indian learning. But the supremacy of English education was re-
inforced in the following decade by the government’s decision to give
preference to candidates with a knowledge of English when making
appointments to the public service. English education was similarly
promoted by the British government in Ceylon, in accordance with the
recommendations of the Colebrooke Commission in 1832, while the
promotion of Dutch education was declared in 1819 to be the funda-
mental policy of the Dutch government in Java.
This was a type of education suited only to a small minority — in
Macaulay’s words, ‘a class who may be interpreters between us and the
millions whom we govern — a class of persons Indian in blood and
colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect’.
The nucleus of such a class seemed already to be in existence in Bengal:
moneyed Hindus living in Calcutta — absentee landlords, merchants,
lawyers, Company officials — were showing a taste for European
luxuries and ideas. Such men had taken the initiative in founding the
Hindu College in Calcutta in 1817, where English was the language
of instruction. As the missionaries had hoped, many orthodox Hindus
found the new ideas unsettling. But comparatively few found that they
pointed towards Christianity. The 1820’s and 1830’s were years of
intellectual ferment in Calcutta: authors such as Voltaire, Hume and
Tom Paine sold well in the bookshops; fresh newspapers and journals
were founded, in Bengali as well as in English; literary and debating
societies flourished; all things were questioned, and young men
scandalised their elders by eating beef and drinking wine. But the
excitement was confined to a small minority, and a movement for
religious reform arose within Hinduism itself: the Bengal renaissance
was to be accompanied by a Hindu reformation. Ram Mohan Roy, a
Brahman and an old servant of the Company, had taken the lead in the
promotion of English education. When the government proposed to
establish a Sanskrit college in Calcutta he protested that the difficulty
of Sanskrit had made it ‘for ages a lamentable check on the diffusion
of knowledge’, and argued that the ‘improvement’ of the people would
be better served by the teaching of the ‘useful sciences’ of Europe. 1
He was himself a student of Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian, as well as of
the new learning, and compared the doctrines of Christianity with those
of Hinduism and Islam. He even published with approval a selection of
Christ’s teachings under the title, The Precepts of Jesus, the Guide to
Peace and Happiness. But he rejected Christian theology, and indeed
converted to Unitarianism a noted Baptist missionary, the Rev.
William Adam — ‘the second fallen Adam’. The Brahmo Samaj, or
Divine Society, which was founded by Ram Mohan Roy in 1828, had
1 Ram Mohan Roy to Amherst, n December 1823. Sharp, op. cit., pp. 99 ff.
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an influence out of all proportion to its numbers, which remained small.
It provided educated Hindus with facilities for regular monotheistic
worship based on selected Hindu texts. The trust deed of its first meet-
ing-house specifically provided that there should be no ‘graven image’
or animal sacrifice: here was a form of Hinduism that was proof against
the more obvious Protestant missionary criticisms. Moreover, it was
compatible with the new ideas: its founder was a well-known social
reformer, an opponent of suttee, an advocate for western education,
even a correspondent of Bentham.
Meanwhile, there had been changes in the European attitude to
Asia. India came to seem more interesting than China. In England, this
was partly a consequence of empire: parliamentary controversy, cul-
minating in the impeachment of Warren Hastings, had attracted public
sympathy for a civilised people at the mercy of a rapacious company.
More important, the Asiatic Society of Bengal had been founded in
1784, and some of the Company’s servants were beginning the scholarly
study of Indian learning. Wilkins’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita
and Jones’s translation of Kalidasa’s drama Shakuntala had been read
with respectful attention, and the historian William Robertson made
use of them when he argued that ancient India had attained a very high
level of civilisation. 1 Germany then took quickly to the serious study
of Indian learning. Jones’s translation of Shakuntala was itself trans-
lated into German by Forster in 1791, and soon won the praise of
Herder and Goethe. Friedrich Schlegel learnt Sanskrit from Alexander
Hamilton, one of the founder members of the Asiatic Society of Bengal,
who was at the time (1803-4) a prisoner on parole in France as a result
of the outbreak of war with England. Friedrich’s brother August Wil-
helm became a professor at Bonn in 1818, and devoted himself to the
study of Sanskrit literature there. Other such appointments soon
followed in Germany. France was also taking account of Indian learn-
ing: Anquetil-Duperron had translated four of the Upanishads from a
Persian translation in 1786, a chair of Sanskrit was established at the
College de France in 1 8 14, and the Societe Asiatique was founded in Paris
in 1821. It was over German thought, however, that Indian learning had
the greatest influence. Goethe, indeed, had his reservations: he disliked,
for example, what seemed to him the more grotesque aspects of Hin-
duism. 2 But there was much in India to fascinate the Germans of the
romantic movement — especially those in search of the primitive lan-
guage, poetry or religion of mankind. Perhaps India would regenerate
Europe : Friedrich Schlegel suggested in 1 808 that Indian literature could
have as important an effect on the European mind as Greek and Latin
1 Robertson, Historical Disquisition Concerning the Knowledge which the Ancients had of
India (London, 1791).
* ‘Keine Bestien in dem Gottersaal’ (no Beasts in the Hall of the Gods).
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literature had had in the fifteenth century. German idealism was also
sensitive to Indian influence: philosophers from Schelling to Schopen-
hauer were eager to profess their approbation. The Indo-European
languages were termed Indo-German by Klaproth as early as 1823,
and it was sometimes suggested that such languages were purer than
those derived from Latin — particularly French. These comparisons
were not always limited to linguistic considerations, but extended to
political, cultural and racial arguments.
Heine contrasted the German thirst for India’s spiritual treasure
with the Portuguese, Dutch and English appetite for India’s material
wealth. Under Utilitarian and Evangelical pressure, Englishmen indeed
seemed to be losing some of their respect for Indian civilisation. In his
influential History of British India (1817) James Mill criticised the
oriental scholars like Jones who had praised India’s cultural achieve-
ments. Instead, he laid stress upon social, moral and intellectual defects
to show how badly India (and by reflection England) needed Benthamite
reforms. In campaigning for the free entry of missionaries into India,
the Evangelicals similarly emphasised the social and moral evils that
seemed to them to be the result of Hinduism : Grant specifically attacked
Robertson for his defence of Hindu institutions such as caste 1 , and
Wilberforce condemned the Indian ‘religious system’ calling it ‘mean,
licentious and cruel’. 2 Similar attacks on Hinduism were occasioned
by campaigns for the prohibition of suttee and for the abolition
of the pilgrim tax. The controversy over English education stimulated
equally reckless condemnations of Indian learning. The bitterness of
much of this argumentation was increased by memories of European
religious disputes: in both Utilitarian and Evangelical writings com-
parisons were made between Hindu and Papist priestcraft and obscur-
antism.
Such criticisms of Indian learning and culture were echoed by some
English-educated Indians. But English education never encouraged
subservience, and as early as 1828 Kasinath Ghose, an old pupil of
the Calcutta Hindu college, was replying to James Mill’s criticisms of
Indian civilisation. His arguments attracted enough attention to be
published in a leading Calcutta newspaper, though they were largely
unheeded. Meanwhile, there were still many English officials who
fostered oriental scholarship in the older tradition. Elphinstone en-
couraged it in Bombay; Raffles encouraged it in Malacca and Java;
the Royal Asiatic Society was founded in London in 1823, and in 1832
H. H. Wilson was chosen to be the first Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford.
1 Grant, Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain,
Particularly with Respect to Morals; and on the Means of Improving It. Parliamentary Papers,
1812-13, X (282), pp. 31 ff.
1 Hansard, xxvi, pp. 864-5.
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He tried to answer Mill, but as he did so by annotating the latter’s
History as if it were a Sanskrit text his arguments also were largely
unheeded. Elphinstone himself wrote a History of India in which the
civilisation of that country was portrayed in a favourable light. But the
general impression that he conveyed was one of decline, and he described
the people as lacking ‘veracity’, ‘manliness’ and ‘National spirit’.
Such generalisations might serve not only to explain but also to justify
the existence of foreign rule, and they came as readily to the pens of
officials as to those of Utilitarians or Evangelicals. The tasks of govern-
ment, which had originally stimulated the English interest in Indian
studies, were now repressing it, for in a reforming age the English came
to India to teach rather than to learn. But the corollary was that once
they had fulfilled their pedagogic functions they would depart, and
Elphinstone was as ready as Macaulay to concede that national inde-
pendence would be the proper result of western education. Already in
1829 Bentinck was publicly inviting ‘all native Gentlemen, Landholders,
Merchants and others’ to suggest reforms for the government to carry
out. In Ceylon, Colebrooke had his commission published in Sinhalese
and Tamil as well as in English, and paid due attention to the resultant
petitions. Also of significance, at least for the future, was the inclusion
in the Act that renewed the East India Company’s Charter in 1833 of a
declaration that no native would be debarred from any post by race or
religion.
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CHAPTER XXI
EUROPE’S ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL
RELATIONS WITH TROPICAL AFRICA 1
C urrents of European expansion had lapped the shores of
Africa since the fifteenth century. But at the end of the
eighteenth century the continent and its peoples were still little
known. If anything, European knowledge of and interest in Africa had
declined since the heyday of Portuguese discovery and expansion in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The coastline was tolerably well
known, even if its scientific survey was to be mainly the work of the
early nineteenth century, and if the east coast was now little frequented
by European mariners. But what knowledge of the interior the Portu-
guese had once gained had been but indifferently passed on to, or remem-
bered by, the other Europeans who had now surpassed them as builders
of empires overseas. Following courses set by forgotten Portuguese
embassies, French merchant-explorers had sought to make the Senegal
river a highway to the empires and gold-mines of the western Sudan that
were known partially through some (though not always the most
accurate) of the medieval Arab writers. But their ambitions had been
frustrated, in part by lack of consistent commercial backing in France,
in part by the hostility both of the Sudanese peoples and of British sea
power. In Guinea, Europeans had been content with their trade in Negro
slaves for the Americas. Slaves were readily purchasable from African
merchants and rulers at the coast. Thus Europeans lacked any incentive
to penetrate inland, while at the same time established African interests
existed to block any such penetration. Further south, the African king-
doms of the lower Congo and Angola, and the protectorates which
Portugal had once sought to establish over them, had both been largely
destroyed by the concentration of Portuguese merchants on this same
trade. The grand designs which the Portuguese had once entertained
of making East Africa an integral part of a vast oriental trading empire
had not survived the Dutch break-through into the Indian Ocean in the
early seventeenth century and the subsequent revival of Arab power and
trade on the east coast. With the disintegration of the Monomotapa
civilisation on the Rhodesian highlands and the decline of its gold-
mining, the thin line of Portuguese settlements, along the Mozambique
coast and up the Zambezi to as far as Tete, had become merely a
refuge for a few Portuguese cast-offs and half-castes engaging in a little
1 At the editor’s request, this topic is here pursued in some aspects into the 1870’s, so as
to link up with Vol. xi, chapter xxn.
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planting and slaving. Although in the sixteenth century the valour of
Portuguese musketeers and of Jesuit missionaries had helped to secure
the survival of the Christian monarchy in Ethiopia, it was soon isolated
behind a curtain of Islam. Until this was penetrated by Napier’s expedi-
tion of 1868, Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas was perhaps a better memorial
than the History of Ludolphus (1681) or even his own translation of
Lobo’s Voyage (1735).
For the greater part of the eighteenth century, effective European
interests in Africa had been reduced to two, the strategic and the
commercial. Both were narrow, involving no need to know the interior
or to make European power felt beyond the coastline. The strategic
interest arose because Africa was a land mass lying athwart or adjacent
to sea lanes of major importance to the mercantile empires of the time.
British and French statesmen were obsessed with the value to the
economy and power of their nations of the sugar-producing islands of
the West Indies. Throughout the eighteenth century also, their soldiers
were battling for mastery of the North American mainland. If the
greatest significance of Africa for European enterprise in America was
always as a source of labour, it was nevertheless also important that the
outward-bound sailing routes upon which both West Indian trade and
armies on the American continent depended passed close by the western-
most shores of Africa. Here, in 1677, the French had taken from the
Dutch (the first to see the strategic importance of the site) the tiny island
of Goree in the lee of the Cape Verde peninsula. The necessities of their
maritime struggle with France involved the British in the occupation of
the island (and often of the nearby mainland trading posts — chief among
them St Louis, at the mouth of the Senegal) during each of the wars of
1756-63, 1778-83, and 1793-1815. In retrospect it is somewhat sur-
prising that a permanent British occupation did not develop in this area.
It was in fact attempted during 1763-83, when the long established
British trading foothold on the Gambia was combined with the
Senegalese conquests into the ‘Province of Senegambia’, the first
British Crown Colony in Africa. But the administration of the colony
was misconceived and mishandled, and its commercial purpose was
thwarted by the competition of French traders from Goree, which in
1763 had been mistakenly returned to France. During the War of
American Independence, although Goree was re-captured, the Senegal
settlements were lost. Even supposing that it had been diplomatically
possible at the peace settlement in 1783 (when Goree was again
handed back to the French), there was no incentive to continue
with the Senegambia colony. Indeed its principal lesson seemed to be
that a crown colony government was an expensive and ineffective way
of dealing with British interests in Africa. So long as Britain retained
command of the sea, a strategic vantage-point like Goree could always
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be taken when required. For the rest, British interests were commercial,
and should best be left for the merchants to manage for themselves as,
for example, was the case on the Gold Coast. Here, by the close of the
eighteenth century, British traders, receiving from their government
nothing more than a small annual subsidy for the upkeep of their forts,
had succeeded in attracting a far greater share of the local trade than was
flowing to the establishments of their Dutch and Danish competitors.
Nevertheless the wartime concern with the Senegambia was eventually
to help pull the British government into closer relations with West
Africa. As early as the I790’s, it was even prepared to appoint a British
consul to reside in the hinterland with the purpose of decoying the
trade of the western Sudan from the trans-Saharan caravan routes
into the hands of British merchants on the Gambia. 1 Nothing came of
this scheme, but a precedent had been set for later government support
for the exploration of the West African interior with a view to its being
opened up to British trade. In addition, uncertainty about the political
future of Goree did serve to draw attention to the advantages of the
Sierra Leone river, a little further to the south, a natural anchorage of
considerable potential value to the British navy.
The sailing routes to India and further Asia, the other major field for
European imperial rivalry in the eighteenth century, touched upon
Africa more directly than those to the West Indies and America.
Initially the main focal point was South Africa. This had been largely
ignored by the Portuguese. They thought its coastline treacherous and
its interior unpromising. In the west, the land, lacking in rainfall, was
barren and thinly peopled. In the better watered east, the Bantu tribes
possessed little to attract traders and were strong enough to deter
European penetration. This isolation of South Africa ended when the
Dutch realised the advantages of the trade-winds south of latitude
40° for ships sailing to and from the East Indies. The ports of the
East African coast, which the Portuguese had used as stepping stones
to India, were now by-passed. Instead attention was turned to the
southernmost limits of Africa. A port of call here would serve the dual
purpose of a victualling station for ships setting out on the long open
sea voyages to east and north, and of a base from which in wartime
naval vessels might protect friendly shipping and bar an enemy’s
access to the Indian Ocean. In 1652, therefore, the Dutch East India
Company planted a settlement, the future Cape Town, on Table Bay,
the least unsatisfactory of the anchorages near the Cape of Good Hope.
Its less powerful English and French rivals for the time being contented
themselves with the use of the flanking islands of St Helena and
Mauritius respectively. During the War of American Independence,
1 C.O. 267/10. Minutes of instructions to James Willis Esqr., His Majesty’s Agent and
Consul General for Senegambia, December 1795.
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however. Cape Town was used to advantage by the French navy. With
the resumption of hostilities in 1793 and the ensuing French occupation
of the Netherlands, Britain acted at the Cape. A temporary military
occupation, 1795-1803, was followed by a second occupation in 1806,
and ultimately in 1814 by the cession of the Cape to Britain.
The colony that thus came into British hands was now far more
extensive than was warranted on strategic grounds. To provide for the
effective victualling and defence of Cape Town, the Dutch company had
been led to encourage European settlement. This proved all too success-
ful, and by the time the policy was reversed, a European farming
community had developed at the Cape which produced appreciably
more than the Company’s ships and garrison could absorb, and which
was increasingly restive under the Company’s economic monopoly and
authoritarian government. The settlement continued to grow, through
natural increase and through miscegenation with the local Hottentots
and with the Malay and Bantu slaves imported by the Company in a
vain attempt to keep down production costs. A growing number of the
colonists turned their backs on the restrictions and limited opportunities
of life at the Cape. They began to make a new life for themselves
trading and cattle fanning on the wide grasslands of the interior. The
direction of their expansion was east and north-east towards the better
watered lands that the Bantu occupied. By the time of the British
arrival, a distinctive trek-Boer society was already in evidence, a
community of sturdy, individualist, pioneer families, whose seventeenth-
century Calvinism inspired them to regard themselves as an elect chosen
by God to civilise the wilderness and to master its heathen coloured
peoples. The trek-Boers had largely cut loose from the currents of
contemporary European civilisation that touched at the Cape, and they
were resentful of control or interference from the authorities at Cape
Town. Indeed, in 1795, some of them had already proclaimed their
formal independence in republics of their own. Just as significantly
they were already fighting for land and cattle with the Bantu tribes
along a frontier which had emerged along the Great Fish River, some
five hundred miles east of Cape Town.
Until about 1825, Britain chose to regard the problems occasioned
by this unwanted inheritance of involvement in the South African
interior essentially in a military light. Her prime concern was the base
at Cape Town. Her policy with regard to the hinterland was therefore
to bring the trek-Boers under control, and to garrison the frontier — in
part with troops, in part with ex-servicemen settlers of her own stock —
with the idea of preventing upsets with the Bantu which might prejudice
the security of Cape Town. In Boer eyes, this positive frontier policy
tended to offset the disadvantages of being brought under stricter and
more effective judicial and administrative control. Y et the South African
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situation was inherently unstable. The growing Boer community was
always avid for more land, and this could now only be found at the
expense of the Bantu tribes that stretched in a solid block north and
north-eastwards of the Great Fish River. Only the continual advance-
ment of the frontier and the reduction of the tribesmen to the status of
serfs could really ensure the quiescence of Anglo-Boer relations.
British actions in a contrary sense would naturally tend to make the
Boers break away from British control in further treks into the interior.
Either way Britain would be enwebbed in a Boer-Bantu conflict which
might reach almost indefinitely into the hinterland, and which would
certainly affect Natal, where lay the richest land and the densest Bantu
settlement.
Natal was an area of some concern to Britain because at Port Natal
(the modern Durban) lay potentially one of the best harbours at the
southern limits of the East African coast. Towards the end of the
eighteenth century, this coast had once again begun to come within the
sphere of European maritime strategy. The French, losing ground to
Britain in the naval struggle for mastery of the ocean lifelines of
European trade and empire, had re-opened interest in the old route to
Asia through the Mediterranean and the Levant. Napoleon’s expedition
to Egypt was frustrated by Nelson’s victory at Aboukir Bay in 1798, and
French plans for a canal through the isthmus of Suez were delayed for
nearly seventy years (p. 533 ). Nevertheless French interest in the
Levant remained a source of anxiety to Britain, especially since the
increasing transformation of her East India Company into a territorial
government was drawing attention to the advantages of the Mediter-
ranean and Red Sea route for the speedy transit of despatches and
officials to and from India. The British and East India Company
governments thus engaged the French in a cold war of diplomatic
intrigue and counter-intrigue, among the Arab states on the shores of
the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf as well as in the Levant proper.
Stategically the East African coast could never be far removed from
these intrigues. In fact there were both diplomatic and commercial
reasons why it must be involved. In 1798, the East India Company
entered into the first British treaty with the ruler of Muscat, in south-
eastern Arabia at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. In the latter part
of the seventeenth century, with Portuguese power weakened by the
Dutch break-through into the Indian Ocean, it had been the Omani of
Muscat who had taken the lead in expelling the Portuguese from the
East African coast north of Mozambique. The Omani rulers still
maintained a claim to suzerainty over the Arab coastal settlements
north of Cape Delgado, even if this was effective only in the island of
Zanzibar. But Zanzibar was significant as the place where Indian
merchants, some of them now British subjects, were becoming indis-
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pensable as merchant-bankers for the Arab trade in East Africa.
Furthermore, under the shelter of British sea power, an able sultan,
Seyyid Said (1806-56), perceived the advantages to himself and his
people of developing Muscat’s African trade and of building up a navy
of his own which could bring the mainland ports under his control.
Although the French were eventually worsted by the British, both in
competition for the favours of the Muscat court and in the maritime
struggle in the Indian Ocean, they too retained an interest in East
Africa. They had developed the Mascarene Islands with sugar planta-
tions which, like their West Indian prototypes, were dependent on
Negro slave labour. This was largely drawn in the first instance from
Madagascar, but the markets here were fed by Arab slavers from the
mainland via the Comoro Islands. Mauritius, which alone among the
Mascarenes has passable harbours, was lost to the British in 1810, but
Reunion (lie de Bourbon) remained in French hands. Its labour needs
combined with the urge to resist the growing power of Britain in the
Indian Ocean to draw the French not only towards Madagascar and
the Comoros, but also into relations with the rulers of East Coast ports
like Kilwa and Mombasa who were naturally hostile to the increase of
Omani power.
Strategic interests underlay much of Europe’s relations with Africa
until as late as the 1860’s, by which time old patterns of maritime
strategy had been upset by such varied factors as the decline of the
colonial economies in the West Indies, the introduction of the com-
pound engine for steamships, and the opening of the Suez Canal.
Nevertheless the prime importance of tropical Africa to Europe at the
end of the eighteenth century was commercial. Towns like Liverpool
and Nantes, for instance, had become among the greatest of English or
French ports mainly through their connection with ‘the African trade’.
In practice ‘the African trade’ meant trade with the West African coast-
lands from about the mouth of the Senegal to about the mouth of the
Congo. Though interest in other products had never lapsed, notably in
gold (from the Gold Coast), gum (from Senegambia), and ivory, 1 yet ‘ the
African trade’ was now virtually synonymous with the trade in Negro
slaves to the Americas.
Despite the interference to Atlantic navigation caused by the sea
wars of 1778-83 and 1793-1815, the slave trade had continued unabated.
By the end of the century around 65,000 African slaves were
being landed alive in the Americas each year. Their market value was
probably of the order of £4,000,000, and the purchase of them in
Africa probably involved Europe in the export of something like
1 The ‘Ivory Coast’, between Cape Palmas and the Gold Coast, took its name from the
trade, though by 1800 elephants seem to have become increasingly scarce even in this
rather thinly populated region.
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£2,000,000 worth of goods a year. It is true that not all of these goods
were of European origin, but the most important exception was Indian
cottons, probably not worth more than about £300,000 a year. It is
thus evident that West Africa was by no means negligible as a market
for European manufactures — wrought metals and hardware, spirits,
guns and gunpowder, beads and trinkets. In Britain’s case, it took some
5 per cent of her exports and, with the growth of industrialisation —
especially perhaps the development of cotton manufacturing — it was to
be expected that its value as a market would increase. Furthermore,
the business of buying slaves in Africa and selling them in America
was extremely profitable. It is true that risks were also high, especially
that of losing part or even the whole of the human cargo from disease,
or from a shortage of water and victuals occasioned by an unexpectedly
lengthy voyage. But these risks could to some extent be offset by profits
on other purchases in Africa that were marketable in Europe, and also
by profits on cargoes picked up in the Americas (though in the eighteenth
century the West Indian sugar crop was no longer brought to Europe
in the ships of the slavers). Even without taking into account the fact
that the whole of plantation production in the American and West
Indian colonies — production which in the case of Britain accounted for
no less than a quarter of her imports — was dependent on a regular
supply of labour from Africa, the slave trade was an important national
interest for the colonial and maritime powers. Thus, for example,
between 100 and 150 British ships sailed for West Africa each year, some
two-thirds of these from the port of Liverpool alone. Contemporary
estimates exist which assert that in the new manufacturing towns like
Manchester and Birmingham, the proportion of the working population
engaged in the production of goods for the African trade may have
been at least a fifth and sometimes, perhaps, something nearer to a half.
Historically the value of the slave trade to Britain is more significant
than its value to France or to any other European state. In the first place,
by the end of the eighteenth century, British merchants had secured the
lion’s share of the trade: at least half the slaves reaching the New
World were being taken there in British ships. The French were the
nearest competitors, carrying about a quarter of the trade in the 1780’s,
though thereafter their share suffered considerably from the effects of
British command of the sea during the war years 1793-1815. The only
other European nation in anything like the same class of business was
Portugal, whose merchants had a distinct southern Atlantic trade of
their own between Angola and Brazil. Against this background of
British predominance, Britain’s decision by Act of Parliament in 1807
to cease trading in slaves was of the first importance in determining the
future pattern of relations between Europe and tropical Africa.
The British were neither the first nor the only nation of European
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stock to reach the conclusion that the slave trade was an immoral
activity. The Danish slave trade had become illegal in 1804, while
slaving was outlawed in the United States in 1808 and in the Nether-
lands in 1814. But the Dutch and Danish shares in the trade were now
insignificant (at most 4000 and 2000 slaves a year respectively), while the
American prohibition could hardly be effective so long as an increasing
number of the states of the Union were economically committed to
slavery and capable of frustrating effective enforcement of the federal
law. Britain, however, possessed not only a strong slave-trading interest,
but also both the will and the naval strength effectively to impose her
laws on it. But the significance of Britain’s action was not only — or
indeed mainly — that at one stroke half of the old eighteenth-century
slave trade was abolished. In fact, once maritime conditions had returned
to normal after 1815, the volume of the Atlantic slave trade showed little
substantial diminution before the 1850’s. Though the British and French
West Indies, hitherto the largest market north of the equator, ceased to
import slaves, demand remained high because of the growth of the
plantation economy on virgin soils in Cuba and Brazil and the remark-
able expansion of cotton cultivation in the southern United States.
Merchants of other nationalities hastened to fill the gap left by the British.
Some of these were Europeans, 1 but for the most part, with the New
World ever more independent of the Old, it was merchants from North
and South America who more than made good the decline in the Euro-
pean supply of slaves to their expanding economies. Recent research
suggests that American imports averaged about 40,000 a year during
1811-20, 50,000 a year in the 1820’s, 37,000 in the 1830’s and 40,000 in
the 1840’s. 2
The real significance of the abolition of the British slave trade lay
elsewhere. In the first place, as a result of her eighteenth-century
predominance in the trade, Britain had a greater established stake in
West Africa than any other nation. She could not, as the Danes and
Dutch eventually did, simply write off her West African interest. Her
merchants needed new opportunities for the shipping, manpower,
capital and goodwill involved in the African trade, needed in short to
find new trades to take the place of that in slaves. This was not easy.
Almost the whole of the existing relationship between Europeans and
Africans on the west coast was conditioned by the business of exporting
slaves. Europeans knew of few other African products which might
offer comparable prospects of profit, while for their part the Africans
1 Particularly Spaniards, for while elsewhere in Europe the forces of intellectual and
social reform were tending towards anti-slave-trade legislation, in Spain the same forces
occasioned the sweeping away of the old ecclesiastical prohibition of slave-trading.
a Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: a Census (Madison, Wisconsin, 1969), ch. 8.
These estimates are appreciably lower than those which were formerly accepted.
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were not generally organised to produce alternatives for sale at the coast
in worthwhile and regular quantities. Of the four principal alternatives
that were known at the beginning of the nineteenth century, only one
proved capable of development to a level at all equivalent to that of the
slave trade. Ivory was already becoming scarce in West Africa, and
neither the exports of gum nor those of gold were capable of expansion
— the one because the European demand for it was limited, and the
other because output could not increase until European technologies
penetrated to the Gold Coast hinterland to reinforce traditional methods
of mining. Only in the case of palm oil was a steady growth in the
European demand matched by an equivalent response from African
producers and exporters. This was most notable in the Niger delta,
then indeed known as the ‘Oil Rivers’. Slave-trading continued here,
but the fortunes of a number of emergent merchant city states became
increasingly dependent on their efforts each to secure a monopoly of
the export of palm oil from its adjacent hinterland. British imports of
palm oil, negligible before 1800, were by the 1860’s running as high as
£1,500,000 a year, rather more than half of this coming from the Oil
Rivers.
But, with this one major exception of the oil trade, the generality of
African merchants found it easier and more profitable, especially in
view of the growing American demand, to continue exporting slaves. The
British merchants trying to develop ‘legitimate’ trades thus often found
it difficult to make headway. This was early demonstrated by the
experience of the Sierra Leone Company. This was founded in 1791
by the British promoters of the agitation against slavery and the slave
trade. In 1772 they had induced the Lord Chief Justice of England, Lord
Mansfield, to give his celebrated judgment that the status of slavery had
no standing in the law of England. Consequently such slaves as had
been brought into England by planters returning from the West Indies
became free men. Some of them found it difficult to adapt themselves
to free society, while comparable problems soon arose in British North
America with Negroes from the thirteen colonies lost to Britain in 1783
who had fought on the British side during the war of independence.
The abolitionists therefore conceived the plan of resettling some of these
former slaves in Africa. Sierra Leone was chosen for the experiment
and, after some early troubles, the Sierra Leone Company was formed
to administer the settlement that was established at Freetown. The
company looked to profits from legitimate trade from the interior as
a source from which it could defray its administrative expenditure,
necessarily heavy in the early years of the colony. But it was soon
apparent that legitimate trade could not flourish in a region where
slave-trading was still active. From 1800 onwards, the colony was
enabled to continue only through the receipt of annual subsidies from
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the British government. Finally, following the abolition of the British
slave trade, responsibility for the colony was transferred directly to the
British Colonial Office.
The second respect in which the British abolition of the slave trade
was significant was that, having persuaded their own government of the
justice of their cause, the British abolitionists prevailed upon it to use its
influence and power to extend the prohibition of the slave trade beyond
its own realm. Here the inability of British legitimate trade to compete
successfully with slave-trading provided a powerful material interest
in support of the moral argument. Following the cessation of hostilities
in the Napoleonic wars, the British government began to urge other
governments to prohibit slave-trading to their subjects. By 1835 the
maritime nations of western Europe and the newly independent
American states had all taken legislative action against the trade, in
many cases of their own free will, but sometimes as the result of direct
British pressure. But, as has already been indicated, it was one thing to
enact legislation against the slave trade but quite another matter to
secure its effective enforcement. Of the other major slave-trading states,
only France had anything like the British incentive to enforce her laws,
and most in any case lacked the naval resources to secure compliance
with their laws by their shipping on the high seas. While both the French
and the United States navies occasionally acted against the slave trade,
only Britain consistently mounted patrols whose sole purpose was the
interception of slave ships. For this purpose, Freetown became an
important base, and for a time the ships of the British West Africa
squadron also utilised the Spanish island of Fernando Po at the other
end of the Guinea coast. The weakness of other nations’ naval efforts
led Britain to engage in a second round of diplomatic activity, negoti-
ating for the right to allow her warships to arrest the slave ships of
other nations, and to bring them before Courts of Mixed Commission
which were established alongside her own Admiralty Courts at Freetown
and elsewhere.
But even in the 1830’$, it was apparent that diplomatic and naval
measures alone could never completely stop the export of slaves from
West Africa. Until effective measures were taken by American govern-
ments against the import of slaves, which was not the case in Brazil until
1851, or in the United States and Cuba until the 1860’s, there were lawless
men prepared to run the risk of interception and capture at sea. It was
impracticable for any navy to maintain a complete watch over the whole
coastline from which slaves might be exported. Moreover such ancient
naval rivals of Britain as France and the United States could never agree
to allow the British navy the full powers which the British government
sought to search and arrest their merchant ships.
Inevitably, then, the British abolitionist interest had to turn its
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attention to Africa itself and try to prevent slaves being offered for sale
on its coasts. This involved it in two principal kinds of activity.
Logically enough, one of these came to be the extension to African
rulers of a system of preventive treaties comparable to those negotiated
with European and American governments. But before this was
embarked upon to any great extent, an attempt had been initiated to
create new economic and moral climates among the African peoples,
with the hope of encouraging the replacement of slave-trading as a
source of wealth and power by a growing legitimate trade.
The first necessity here was clearly the exploration of the African
interior, hitherto concealed behind the coastal barrier erected by the
slave trade. It was desirable to discover what commodities other than
slaves the hinterland might offer to Europe, to what extent African
communities were organised to produce and to trade such com-
modities, and what (if any) means of transport existed by which they
could be brought down to the coast and European goods taken inland
in exchange. Between 1788 and 1855, the main lines of the interior
geography of West Africa were laid bare by a succession of European
explorers entering either from the coast or along the traditional trans-
Saharan trade routes from North Africa. Britain took a predominant
part in this exploration. It was Mungo Park and the Lander brothers
who were primarily responsible for charting the 3000 mile course of the
great river Niger which, whether reached from the Senegal or Gambia
rivers in the west, or through its own delta (the Oil Rivers) in the south-
east, offered the most promising natural access to the western Sudan.
The principal pioneers who disclosed to the outside world the ancient
civilisation and commerce of the Sudan itself were Denham and
Clapperton, Rene Caillie and, above all, Heinrich Barth. Of these
explorers, only Caillie was acting independently of Britain; the German,
Barth, like Park on his second expedition, Denham and Clapperton,
and the Landers, was in the employ of the British government.
The credit for awakening official British interest in the exploration of
West Africa must undoubtedly go to the Association for Promoting
the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa, founded in London in
1788, which sponsored the early journeys of Niger exploration that led
up to Park’s first journey in 1795-7. It has been argued, however, that
the African Association’s purpose was not so closely tied to the British
anti-slave-trade movement, or to the humanitarian movement generally,
as has commonly been supposed, but rather that its colouring was first
scientific and then commercial. 1 It would seem that it was the British
government, instructing Clapperton on his second journey (1825-7)
to negotiate a treaty of friendship with a Sudanese ruler which would
1 See, for example, A. Adu Boahen, ‘The African Association, 1788-1805’, Trans. Hist.
Soc. Ghana, vol. VI (Achimota, 1961), pp. 43-64.
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ban the slave trade, which first put a deliberate anti-slave-trade gloss on
the exploration. 1 It would seem indeed that the abolitionist cause was
first projected into Africa less by the explorers than by the missionaries
of the new Protestant missionary societies which were multiplying in
Europe — not least in Britain — by the end of the eighteenth century. But
even here the approach to the problem of the slave trade was initially
indirect. The first of the new missions to Africa was that of the
Moravian Brethren. As early as 1737 this society had sent out a pioneer
to convert the South African Hottentots. But within a few years he
had felt the hostility of the social environment at the Cape and had
returned to Europe. When, two generations later, the crusade was
resumed, it was due to British initiative, and the first efforts were not
unnaturally directed to Sierra Leone. But the first missions of the
Church Missionary Society and of the Wesleyans in Sierra Leone (1806
and 18 1 1) were not intended to convert Africans and to create new social
orders inimical to such barbarities as the trade in human beings, but
essentially to minister to the needs of the freed slave community at
Freetown, for which Britain was already responsible and which was
already subject to European influences. The extension of missionary
activity into the truly indigenous field in West Africa was largely a
consequence of the official British espousal of anti-slave-trade action.
In particular it arose from the activities of the British West African naval
squadron.
It was these activities that were to make Sierra Leone far more signi-
ficant in Europe’s relations with West Africa than either of the other two
coastal colonies for freed Negroes that were established in emulation of
it. The independent Afro-American Republic of Liberia, proclaimed in
1847, was always handicapped by its origins (1821) as a private venture
of the American Colonisation Society. It lacked both adequate finance
and the political support which only an established government could
provide. Libreville, established by the French on the Gaboon in 1849,
did not develop as Freetown and Sierra Leone did, mainly because the
French naval effort against the slave trade was nothing like as great or
as consistent as the British. But in the sixty years after 1807, as many
as 70,000 Negroes liberated from captive slave ships were settled at
Sierra Leone. The majority of these became assimilated to European
and Christian civilisation and, beside swelling the creole population of
Sierra Leone itself, became an important acculturating influence else-
where in the West African coastlands. Some of them became consider-
able merchants in the coastal trade. Many more found employment
with British traders or missionaries, and not only at the lower levels,
for the missionary foundation of Fourah Bay College in 1827 had
opened up an important channel to higher education. Sierra Leone
1 C.O. 2/16. Bathurst to Clapperton, 30 July 1825.
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was soon producing, and exporting, not only clerks, but schoolteachers
and priests, and eventually lawyers and doctors also. It was also training
Africans from other territories. Some of the Sierra Leone creoles
established themselves in business or the professions elsewhere along the
coast. A notable re-emigration of former slaves who had been taken
from Lagos and its hinterland afforded a significant beginning for the
growth of European influence there and gave the missions their first
entry into Yorubaland. To a much lesser degree, the British naval
occupation of Fernando Po during 1827-34 produced similar results
further east, notably in the Cameroons.
If Sierra Leone thus became a vital nursery for the extension of an
informal European and Christian influence, an influence which in-
evitably had a British tinge, the existence of the colony also tended to
bring about an increase of formal British power in the West African
coastlands. The British government was committed, for the first time
since 1783, to the administration of an area of West African territory.
It is true that, compared with the bold Senegambia scheme, the
territorial conception of Sierra Leone was limited, even though the
colony did naturally tend to expand to some small extent as more
liberated slaves were landed. But the British government was now
dedicated to the eradication of the slave trade, and the actual and
continuing presence on the coast of officials of such a government was
apt to have important consequences. It was not long before a governor
of Sierra Leone, Sir Charles MacCarthy, concluded that the most
effective method of stopping the export of slaves from the coast was to
extend direct British control over it. A number of new annexations
were made, and in 1822 the administration of the British merchants’
forts on the Gold Coast and Gambia was placed under his govern-
ment. This brought MacCarthy into a fatal collision with the armies of
Ashanti, a growing inland power which had for some time been seeking
to dominate the small states of the Gold Coast littoral. In 1828 this
led the British government, aware that the cost of its West African
administration to the British taxpayers was steadily growing while the
volume of the Atlantic slave trade was still increasing, to reverse course
and to cut its direct commitments in West Africa to the minimum.
But although the traditional attitude that the British interest in
West Africa was more commercial than colonial lasted into the 1870’s,
and was indeed given perhaps its most positive expression in the report
of a Parliamentary Select Committee of 1865, 1 it proved impossible to
maintain in practice. Freetown, both as the home of the creoles and
as a vital naval base, could not be abandoned, and the continuance of
the anti-slave-trade patrols created countless situations in which direct
1 1865, v (412), Report of Select Committee on the state of the British Settlements on the
West Coast of Africa.
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British governmental intervention in West Africa could scarcely be
avoided. Furthermore, the activities of the British traders — and to
some extent also of the missionaries — continued to draw their govern-
ment into assuming greater West African responsibilities. This was first
seen on the Gold Coast. Here, following the official withdrawal in
1828, the merchants had thought it desirable to create for the forts a
government of their own. The agent they chose to lead this administra-
tion, George Maclean, was a forward-looking man who conceived that
the British commercial interest on the Gold Coast could best be
advanced through the establishment of a firm peace with Ashanti and
of some degree of British jurisdiction over the weaker states between
Ashanti and the sea. By 1842-4 he had extended British power so far
in advance of official policy that the government thought it desirable to
return to the Gold Coast and assume direct control of the informal pro-
tectorate he had erected. That its agents were generally less successful
than Maclean had been in dealing either with Ashanti or with the in-
creasingly western-influenced communities of the coastal states, in the
long run served only to enmesh the Colonial Office more firmly in Gold
Coast affairs. Eventually, in 1873-4, a punitive expedition was mounted
against Ashanti and the Gold Coast was annexed.
Further east too, the combined activities of Britain’s anti-slave-trade
squadron, her merchants and missionaries, led in the same direction.
In 1849 the Foreign Office thought it necessary to begin appointing
consuls for the Gulf of Guinea. These had the dual purpose both of
keeping a watch on the slave trade and negotiating treaties against it
with African rulers, and also of protecting the interests of legitimate
traders and missionaries in their dealings with the numerous African
authorities. The first of these consuls, John Beecroft, came to his
duties with experience of administering the freed slave community on
Fernando Po and of exploring the commercial possibilities revealed by
the Landers’ discovery that the Oil Rivers were the Niger Delta; he
quickly developed the practice of calling on the might of British war-
ships to support the growth of British influence. The result was the
occupation (1851) and finally the annexation (1861) of Lagos, hitherto
a major port for the export of slaves from a Yorubaland beset by
civil war, and also the growth of an informal British jurisdiction over
the Delta and its competing states.
Britain’s preoccupation with the fight against the slave trade and with
the promotion of legitimate trade in its place, meant that by the 1870’s
and the eve of the European partition, she had developed a wide interest
along the West African coast, and had secured positive footholds at a
number of points. The only other European state with a considerable
stake in West Africa was France. But the French position was a very
different one. Along the coast generally, the activities of French
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merchants (and, for that matter of the French navy and missionaries)
were spasmodic and of relatively min or significance. French interest
was concentrated in her traditional sphere of the Senegal. Here, after
a number of other schemes had been tried, a French soldier-adminis-
trator, General Faideherbe, had at length found a worthwhile replace-
ment for the outmoded gum- and slave-trading interests. Between 1854
and 1865, he had engaged in the systematic conquest of the Senegal
valley and the conversion of its peoples into peasant producers of
groundnuts, another oil-crop valuable to the European economies and
to that of France in particular. Faideherbe’s conquests had been brought
to a halt, on the verge of their extension to the upper Niger and to the
Sudan generally, in part by the domestic misfortunes of France, in
part by the stiffening resistance of the Sudanese peoples, who during the
nineteenth century were experiencing a remarkable Islamic renaissance.
Nevertheless it was his territorial advance rather than the infiltrative
activities of the British merchants, missionaries, naval officers and
consuls along the coast, that set the pattern for the future expansion
of European power in West Africa.
Neither the British explorers nor the British anti-slave-trade cam-
paigners were content with their achievements in West Africa. They
ventured into other fields, notably into the interior of east and central
Africa, where the growth of the power and wealth of the Omani govern-
ment of Zanzibar was producing an extensive and destructive burgeon-
ing of the combined slave and ivory trade of the Arabs. These ventures
flowed in part from the established British and British-Indian con-
nexion with Zanzibar, but they were also a consequence of develop-
ments in South Africa. Here, by the 1830’s, the increasingly liberal and
humanitarian trends in British society had produced an explosive situa-
tion. The British occupation occasioned a flowering of Christian
missions to the Cape’s non-European peoples. From about 1825
onwards, the missionaries’ promptings that the colony’s legal and
social system was prejudicial to coloured rights and interests began to
find ready ears among those responsible for the direction of British
policy. The liberalisation of the Cape’s constitution and laws after
1825, and the reluctance of the British government to contemplate any
further costly advance of the frontiers of white settlement, combined
after 1836 to induce many frontier Boers to break out from the Cape
Colony in the exodus known as the Great Trek. By the 1850’s, the
British government had reconciled itself to the recognition of inde-
pendence for Boer republics on the interior plateau, though not on the
shores of the Indian Ocean, where in 1845 Natal had been annexed.
But the poverty of the small and isolated trekker communities — in itself
sufficient justification for the limitation of the British frontiers — in-
evitably led to further involvement. The continuing Boer demand for
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land, and to some extent also for servile labour, placed intolerable
strains on African peoples whose political cohesion was necessarily
menaced by the advance of European settlement. The republics were ill-
equipped to deal with the inter-racial unrest and warfare which resulted.
In the 1870’s and 1880’s the discovery that the interior was rich in both
diamonds and gold began to change the economic picture, and at the
same time the anti-colonial strain in British policy began to weaken.
Thus the stage was set for further conflicts between Britain and the
Boers, conflicts in which the interests of the non-European majority
were largely forgotten.
One effect of the expansion of the racially exclusive Boer society into
the South African interior was to narrow the field available for mission-
ary enterprise beyond the borders of the Cape Colony. There were
openings for missions to the Bantu tribes in British Natal and in areas
like Basutoland whose density of population was such that they had
been left as black islands in the flood of white settlement. But the main
northward drive of the missions from the Cape into the interior became
concentrated along the narrow corridor of Bechuanaland between the
Boer republics and the arid Kalahari. In 1849-51, the greatest mission-
ary pioneer of them all, David Livingstone, debouched from this
corridor into the more fertile lands of the middle Zambezi. But access
to this region was not easy over the 2000 miles of a tenuous line of
communication northwards from the Cape. So in 1853-6 Livingstone
undertook the great lateral journey across the continent which brought
him first to Luanda, in Angola, and then to Quilimane in Mozambique.
This journey was to have most important consequences. Livingstone
had begun to disclose to the outside world the existence of the great,
climatically attractive, highlands of central and eastern Africa. Their
native peoples, unaffected by the discomfitures of Boer expansion,
seemed a fruitful field for missionary endeavour. Much of this country
was claimed by Portugal, on the ground that it lay between her long
established Angolan and Mozambique colonies; but Livingstone re-
vealed that the only effective Portuguese influence in the interior was
that of half-caste traders whose expeditions in search of slaves and
ivory were bringing about a steady destruction of African life. Living-
stone began to argue most forcibly that this destruction must — and
could best — be stayed by the injection into the highlands of a leaven of
European missionaries and traders whose example would bring about
the material as well as the moral regeneration of African society. His
propaganda caught the public ear at home, and in 1858-64 he was
commissioned by the British government to explore and develop the
route into the interior from the east coast. The Zambezi did not prove
to be a useful navigable waterway, and Livingstone was thus diverted
northwards into the highlands of Nyasaland. But here he witnessed
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an even greater destruction of African society than that caused by the
Portuguese traders, for in Nyasaland he was entering the southern
fringes of the trading empire operated by Arab and Swahili merchants
from Zanzibar. East and central Africa’s need for Christianity and
legitimate commerce became even more evident.
The immediate response to Livingstone’s appeal for European
missionaries and traders to go to central Africa to redeem it from
barbarism was small and ineffective; and when in 1873 he died during
the course of his third great journey of exploration, he was a lonely and
a frustrated man. But the magnetism of his personality and the romance
of his discoveries had drawn a flood of other explorers into the heart-
lands of Africa. Between 1857 and 1877, Richard Burton, J. H. Speke,
James Grant, Samuel White Baker and H. M. Stanley had between them
solved all the main problems of the interior drainage system of Africa
that Livingstone himself had been erratically exploring during his own
last journey. Lakes Nyasa, Tanganyika, Victoria Nyanza and Albert
had all been placed on the map. The whole course of the great Congo
river had been explored, and the age-old mystery of the sources of the
Nile had been finally solved. The ground-work had therefore been
laid for later European penetration. By his journey down the Congo in
1874-7, Stanley had revealed one of the principal arteries of this
penetration. He was shortly to appear as one of its first agents, for when
he next came to the Congo, it was as an employee of King Leopold II
engaged in laying the foundations for the Congo Free State.
But a more immediate consequence of Livingstone’s travels, and of
the books and speeches in which he presented both them and his ideas
to a European public ever more interested in Africa, was to intensify
British hostility to the East African slave trade. This trade differed
in a number of respects from that which Britain was fighting, and at
length beginning to overcome, in West Africa. Here was no network of
trade between African states, ending in African coastal merchants pre-
senting slaves for sale to Europeans. Arabs and Arabised Africans
resident at the coast operated slaving caravans which penetrated far
into the interior, by the 1860’s indeed as far as the upper Congo. These
men were Muslims to whom slavery was a matter of course. There was
the further difference that their operations were designed to produce
ivory just as much as slaves. It is true that substantial numbers of slaves
were exported to Muslim markets in Arabia and elsewhere in western
Asia, and were also employed on the profitable clove plantations which
Seyyid Said had initiated in Zanzibar and Pemba; but the first purpose
of many of the slaves taken in the interior was to carry down to the coast
tusks of the ivory that was so much in demand in Europe as well as in
Asia. In default of other means of transport, head-porterage was the
only means of taking goods into and out of the interior. It was naturally
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expensive, prohibitively so if the porters had to be paid as well as fed.
Thus in East Africa there was at once a strong established interest in
slavery and the slave trade that was difficult for any Christian power to
assail, and also a major difficulty in the way of developing alternative
legitimate trades. On the other hand, in East Africa Britain had the
advantage that she did not have to deal with a multiplicity of European
and African authorities, but essentially only with the government of
Zanzibar. It was from Zanzibar that the whole trade was financed and
controlled, and Britain already had established relations of friendship
with its Omani government.
As early as 1822, when Said was still at Muscat, Britain, anxious to
stop the importation of slaves into her Indian territories, had used her
influence at Oman to secure the Moresby treaty by which Arab slave-
ships became legally restricted to the coastal waters of East Africa and
Arabia. This treaty had a certain advantage to Said, for it implicitly
recognised his claim to suzerainty over the East African coast north of
Cape Delgado, and he loyally co-operated with the British navy to
secure its enforcement. The umbrella of British approval was also of
service to Said when he came to take steps to enforce this suzerainty
over the Arab coastal towns. There was thus little difficulty in securing
a second treaty (1845) by which, to help stop the smuggling of slaves
into India, the Arab slave trade was further restricted to Said’s African
territories.
But these treaties had no effect on the destructive activities of the
slave-traders in the interior. On the contrary, the growth of power and
wealth at Zanzibar made possible the organisation of ever bigger and
stronger caravans, capable of penetrating ever further into the interior
towards less depleted sources of ivory and slaves. It was on this aspect
of the trade that attention became focused as a result of Livingstone’s
explorations. But to act against it involved Britain in a frontal assault
on what the friendly Muslim government and community at Zanzibar
could only regard as its most vital and legitimate interests. From 1869
onwards, however, Britain had at Zanzibar a consul. Sir John Kirk,
who was an old associate of Livingstone. The argument was presented
to the successors of Said (who had died in 1856) that the continued
independence and prosperity of their government and people was so
dependent on Britain’s favour and protection that they could not afford
to defy her. This argument had its validity. By the 1860’s, Britain and
British India had secured a dominant position in Zanzibar’s growing
legitimate trade. Moreover, in 1862 Britain had finally removed the
danger of French intervention in East Africa by securing France’s
subscription to a joint declaration to respect the independence of the
Zanzibar sultanate. (A tacit corollary was that France was to have
liberty of action in Madagascar and the Comoro Islands.) But even so,
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it was only the threat of a British blockade of Zanzibar that finally
induced Sultan Bargash in 1873 to agree that the slave trade should be
outlawed throughout his realm. The treaty effectively put a stop to the
importing and exporting of slaves at Zanzibar itself, but, like its
predecessors, it proved to have no effect on slave-trading in the interior.
The Arab merchants there, though acknowledging the ultimate
sovereignty of the sultan, were operating far beyond his effective
jurisdiction. The main practical effect of the treaty was twofold. First,
the maintenance of the sultan’s government, even in Zanzibar itself, was
henceforward largely dependent on British support. Secondly, Britain
had virtually committed herself to a policy of helping the sultan develop
an effective political administration on the mainland.
Thus by the mid- 1870’s, the situation in East Africa had been
brought into line with that in West Africa. Nowhere in Africa, except
in the extreme south, had Europeans made any deep impression on
the continent. The vast majority of Africans were still under native
governments, however much the strength and purpose of these govern-
ments had been twisted or undermined by the operations of the slave
trade (or, in South Africa, by the advance of European settlement).
The formal advance of European power into tropical Africa was thus
small. On the other hand, in both East and West Africa, and, in a
different way, in South Africa also, a dominant external influence had
been created by the advance of British merchants, missionaries, explorers
and consuls. This was not to be without its significance in formulating
the course for the European partition of the 1880’s and 1890’s.
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CHAPTER XXII
THE UNITED STATES AND THE OLD WORLD,
1794-1828
W hen on 16 August 1823 the British Foreign Secretary, with
unwonted affability, suggested to the American Minister in
London that the two countries might go hand in hand in dis-
approving French interference with the independence of Spanish
America, George Canning was swallowing his distaste for republican
principles in deference to the logic of British interests as interpreted
by the Liberal Tories. The gesture was motivated both by the problem
set by the friends of legitimacy and by a consciousness that British
industrialism needed American markets and raw materials. In Washing-
ton, President Monroe’s first reaction to this proposal was to follow
Jefferson and Madison in encouraging a rapprochement with Britain
which would benefit American interests in the Atlantic; but the decisive
voice was that of the secretary of state. John Quincy Adams ignored
Canning’s offer and drafted that independent declaration warning the
European Powers off the Western Hemisphere which the world came to
know as the Monroe Doctrine.
the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have
assumed and maintain [ran Monroe’s Message to Congress] are henceforth not to
be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.
And the Message went on to explain:
The political system of the allied powers is essentially different from that of America.
This difference proceeds from that which exists in their respective Governments;
and to the defense of our own, which has been achieved by the loss of so much
blood and treasure, and matured by the wisdom of their most enlightened citizens,
and under which we have enjoyed unexampled felicity, this whole nation is devoted.
We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the
United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on
their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to
our peace and safety.
In these phrases Adams, the son of the minister who had refused to
wear court dress at St James’s, assumed the correct republican posture.
Experienced in diplomacy and bred in the stiff-necked puritanism of the
Adams family, John Quincy was more fiercely nationalist than his
colleagues, more aware of the possibilities for American freedom of
action and of the need to re-define a republican isolation from the
concert of European Powers. Despite the fact that its efficacy depended
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on the British navy, Monroe’s message was not empty rhetoric. It
showed the world that the American Republic, founded on revolutionary
principles and developing an unique national character, could not
acquiesce in the role of an appendage to the European system. Para-
mount among American interests was republicanism; and in success-
fully asserting this, the United States showed that she had found herself
as a nation.
Long after independence, the possibility of achieving a republic had
remained in doubt at home as well as abroad; and yet there could be no
turning back from the American Revolution. The thirteen ex-colonies
must either evolve a common frame of government consonant with the
principles which had justified taking up arms, or fall prey to anarchy
and foreign domination. And the implications of the Revolution were
profound. A state grounded upon natural rights, upon a federalism
which would provide sufficient unity in continental diversity, upon the
principle of limited powers defined by a written constitution; a republic
which separated church from state, which denied the morality of
empire, of dynastic aggrandisement, of Old World nationalism, which
was isolationist, if not pacifist, by instinct; a state in which citizenship
was the privilege of those who chose to embrace republican principles
irrespective of native nationality and ethnic origin, and where the
private, material interests of the individual were exalted over all other
ends of government: such were the implications faced by the generation
which came to maturity at the turn of the nineteenth century. For them
the unfinished portico and dome of the Capitol rising above the swampy
Potomac, with fluted pillars carved with a motif of Indian corn, sym-
bolised what had come to seem a noble, if still precarious, experiment
in government. There was a chance that the experiment could succeed
if it could be protected in its American wilderness from the European
world’s slow stain.
Isolationism, however, was a state of mind rather than an objective
condition, and the preoccupied Americans had to feel their way towards
their new synthesis of society amid the distractions of a disordered
external world. Virginians, New Englanders and Pennsylvanians
became conscious of enjoying a common, and peculiarly American,
national character, in addition to sharing republican institutions, as a
result of their common resistance to outside pressures. In 1794 the
natural frontiers of the Republic had still to be established against the
claims of Britain, France and Spain. Though the Jeffersonian ideal
might be a republic of self-sufficient husbandmen, the United States
could not exist, let alone grow, without those commercial connections
overseas which enabled her to exchange her raw materials for manu-
factures and to attract European capital and labour for her internal
development. It was in pursuit of such interests that Americans
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became accustomed to rallying beneath the Union flag in western out-
posts and to protecting on the high seas not only their trade but that
citizenship by naturalisation which was unique to their national
character. From 1794, when Washington retired from the presidency
counselling, not the absolute isolation he knew to be impossible, but the
avoidance of permanent alliances which would draw the Republic into
the alien system of European Powers, until Canning’s approach of 1823
with its recognition of a genuine American sphere of interest, the
Americans struggled to preserve an independent identity in the turbu-
lence of international politics.
The Republic was first and foremost an idea, not a land or a people;
and its very abstraction was enhanced by the lack of definition to its
geographic boundaries and to the make-up of its population. The open
westward-shifting frontier and the recruitment of immigrants en-
couraged Americans to think dynamically of movement, growth and the
future, to turn their backs on the European past and to assume a
manifest western destiny to which the persistent intrusion of European
Powers was an affront. The settlement of the lands between the
Appalachians and the Mississippi was the dominant influence shaping
the fortunes of the young Republic, setting the terms for her resumed
relations with Europe, and, by creating a new great sectional interest,
profoundly altering the balance of politics.
An early, characteristic act of the Republic was the conduct in 1790
of a census. From this and its decennial successors we know that the
population more than trebled between 1790 and 1830, from 3-9 to
12-8 million, largely the result, since there was yet little immigration, of
natural increase. The older areas of the littoral became more densely
settled and people were especially attracted to the bigger ports, notably
New York which almost quadrupled its 1790 population (33,131) in the
subsequent thirty years ; but they also spread south and west through the
valleys and passes of the Appalachians, out beyond State boundaries into
the country of the Ohio and Tennessee, the advance guard of a migrant
army which neither natural hazards, Indians, European Powers nor the
United States Government could ultimately discourage or control.
Nomads like Daniel Boone were followed by individuals and fa mi lies
riding and waggoning along the Cumberland and Wilderness roads,
floating down the Ohio tributaries and clinging to the wooded river
bottoms, intent on settling with rifle and hatchet to a wilderness life.
The Indian menace was checked by the tiny United States Army, from
the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794 to the War of 1812 which finally
secured the Old Northwest, by successive treaties, more or less dis-
honoured, for the cession of Indian lands, and in 1825 by the Federal
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Government’s policy of removing the remaining tribes across the
Mississippi. Already in 1784 the trans-Allegheny settlements had
clamoured to enter the Union as the State of Franklin; and the North-
west ordinance of 1787 had established the procedure whereby the
western lands, ceded by the States to the Federal Government, should
be administered as Territories until, as in the case of Kentucky in 1792,
Tennessee in 1796 and Ohio in 1803, they should qualify by population
for admission as States.
The settler’s assumption of a natural right to land he had cleared
frustrated a Federal land policy which favoured systematic develop-
ment by moneyed interests. The Act of 1796 which attracted the
speculative investor with a minimum price of $2 an acre and a lot of 640
acres was successively modified until the Act of 1820 reduced the price
to $1.25 and the purchase to 80 acres, and shortly thereafter rights of
pre-emption were granted. Easier conditions lured settlers to the west
in land booms, in the 1790’s, between 1816 and 1819 and in the mid-
twenties. The territory accessible to the Ohio and lower Mississippi
became thinly populated by rude communities raising a surplus of
corn and salt pork, potash and timber which could be rafted down
stream to New Orleans market. In the early 1820’s steamboats made
the entire Mississippi-Ohio into a single economic system with inland
ports like Nashville, Cincinnati and St Louis and a Gulf port at New
Orleans. Pioneers were settling the wooded country of Ohio, Indiana
(admitted a State in 1816) and Illinois (1818); planters, the rich alluvial
cotton lands of Mississippi (1817) and Alabama (1819).
By 1828 most of the best wooded country east of the Mississippi had
been taken up, together with two tongues thrust west across the river
into Louisiana, a State in 1812, and Missouri, a State in 1821. Save
for Stephen Austin’s settlement beckoning from distant Texas, further
expansion seemed to most Americans problematical. The open prairies
towards the Great Lakes which would grow wheat were still shunned
by pioneers used to forest craft, and further to the north-west, the
Territory of Michigan was described in school atlases as ‘interminable
swamp’. Beyond the ‘Permanent Indian Frontier’ established by Con-
gress in 1825 between the Big Bend of the Missouri and the Red river
stretched a formidable barrier of Indian reservations; and beyond this
lay the High Plains, written off as ‘the Great American Desert’, unfit
for habitation. Only trappers and an occasional missionary left
Independence, Missouri, for the Rockies along trails blazed by fur
companies and explorers such as Lewis and Clark, Pike, Long and the
English botanist Thomas Nuttall. It seemed as if the Republic had
reached her natural frontiers.
These frontiers were not stabilised without conflict. In the wilderness
of the Wabash, on lonely Mississippi waters and in Florida swamps the
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American intruder found evidence of European activity; and his rights
were only established by the diplomatic and military intervention of the
United States Government which took full advantage of the Powers’
preoccupations during and after the Napoleonic upheaval. Although
the British evacuated the military posts of the Old Northwest in 1794
under the terms of Jay’s Treaty, Canadian Governors were suspected
of intriguing with Indian tribes until the bloodletting of the War of 1812
reduced the temperature of Canadian-American relations. Thereafter
it was possible in 1817 for Rush and Bagot in Washington to negotiate
that virtual demilitarisation of the Great Lakes which was a landmark
in the history of disarmament and in the following year for Rush and
Gallatin in London to settle the north-west boundary between the
United States and Canada along the 49th Parallel between the Lake of
the Woods and the Rockies. Spain had recognised the rights of
navigation on the Mississippi and granted the right of deposit at New
Orleans by the Pinckney Treaty of 1795; but the continental future of
the Republic was only assured as an uncovenanted benefit from
Napoleonic preoccupations when in 1803 Jefferson acquired Louisiana
from Napoleon for three million dollars : a bargain lot which consisted
not merely of New Orleans but of the entire territory between the
Mississippi and the Rockies. The seizure by the United States of West
Florida in 1813 and the acquisition of East Florida by the Adams-Onis
Treaty with Spain in 1819 rounded out the territorial possessions of the
United States for a generation.
If the western communities were to transcend a subsistence life they
must find a surplus of commodities to trade, means of transport and
markets. To send the products of the forest economy, apart from
maize-distilled whisky and pelts, east through the mountains was
too costly; and the trade in provisions and timber products down river
was limited by distance, uncertainty and lack of demand. The West
needed what the old tobacco-planting South had enjoyed: a low-cost
staple with a sale in European markets. By such means this un-
developed area could obtain the profits of specialisation and the
benefits of integration with the advanced economies of Europe.
Fortunately the opening of the lower Mississippi valley coincided with a
phenomenal growth in the demand for a commercial crop peculiarly
suited to it. Eli Whitney’s famous invention in 1793 of the gin which
permitted the use of the ubiquitous, short-staple cotton plant made
possible a re-deployment of the old plantation economy based on Negro
slaves in order to take advantage of the insatiable demand of Lan-
cashire for cotton; and by the 1820’s the cost advantage of the virgin
soils bordering the Gulf of Mexico and the ease of river transport to
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New Orleans and Mobile made Mississippi and Alabama the centre of a
primary industry which was shipping sixty million pounds of raw
cotton annually to Europe.
It is hardly possible to exaggerate the importance of cotton in the
development of the West and of the United States as a whole. The
Cotton Kingdom was an integral element in that great textile innova-
tion which made Lancashire the power-house of the early industrial
revolution; and the United States benefited from the phenomenal
increases in productivity which ensued. Cotton brought about the
commercial reconciliation between Britain and her one-time colonies,
the cordiality of which was masked by the record of diplomatic friction.
By 1820 Britain and the United States were once again each other’s best
customer, and cotton was the dominant factor in the equation. By
1830 raw cotton, the greater part of which went to Britain, constituted
nearly 50 per cent of the value of U.S. exports, and 76 per cent of the
raw cotton imported into Britain came from the Southern States;
cotton manufactures represented 48 per cent of British exports in general
and 33 per cent of exports to the U.S.A. The relationship, in terms of
products and markets, of primary producer and manufacturer, could
hardly be more complementary. By means of cotton the United States
and Britain were so closely bound together that it is appropriate to
speak not of two separate economies but of two sectors, one ‘colonial’,
the other ‘metropolitan’, of a single Atlantic economy.
In the United States the influence of cotton was felt beyond New
Orleans, Savannah and Charleston, in eastern ports and above all in
New York whose commercial advantages enabled her to dominate a
trade which had much to do with her ascendancy as the American
terminus of the Liverpool trade. The merchant houses of Baltimore,
Philadelphia and New York were linked with those of Liverpool and
London in a commercial system which was coming to have as its object,
not only the exchange of British textiles, hardware and other manu-
factures for American cotton, flour and timber products, but the long-
term development of the American interior. In the late 1820’s British
merchant bankers were beginning to look to North America as an
object of investment, not merely in those Government securities and land
titles which had continued to interest a few like Alexander Baring since
the 1790’s, but in the means for opening up the land to markets:
planters’ banks, turnpikes, canals, even a railroad; and a few of the
more resourceful Anglo-American houses, such as Brown Brothers of
Baltimore and Liverpool, were acquiring experience as merchant bankers
which was to enable them in the next decade to abandon dry goods for
commercial loans and the selling of American securities to British in-
vestors. By re-investing British earnings in the American trade, the
City of London protected the United States from diificulties about her
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balance of payment and provided funds for the further development of
the Mississippi valley. As with capital, so with labour. Empty shipping
space on the westward run left room for emigrants, a commodity which
brought profits to ship-owners and from the mid- 1820’s an inexhaustible
labour supply. Goods, capital and labour moved easily across the
Atlantic. By 1830 the commercial relations between Britain and the
United States had become something unique between two sovereign
States. No wonder George Canning favoured a diplomatic rapproche-
ment.
This new equilibrium, which restored the independent Republic to a
position in Atlantic commerce with most of the advantages and few
of the disadvantages of colonial times, had only been reached after
decades of strain culminating in war.
In 1783 the Americans had still been faced with the problem of the
British colonial system, except that instead of being inside gazing out
they were outside gazing in; in particular, they were now denied access
not to the French but to the British West Indies. The British Govern-
ment, judging correctly that the Americans needed the British con-
nection, adopted the policy, advocated by Lord Sheffield in his Observa-
tions on American Commerce, of denying commercial concessions to the
Republic. Because British manufactures were superior and cheap and
British credits generous, Americans continued to import from the
United Kingdom, to the amount in 1784 of $18 • 5 million, whereas they
were only able to send thither $3-75 million of raw materials. The
resulting deficit was made good only with difficulty by earnings
elsewhere.
Fortunately, though trade with western Europe proved disappoint-
ing, profitable connexions were established with Russia, the Far East
and later with South America. Ships built in New England out-sailed,
Yankee masters out-navigated, and Yankee supercargos out-bargained
their rivals in distant seas; and with the unpromising counters of fish,
rum, timber and furs, they manipulated a complex trading system which
filled stores and homes with a remarkable array of imports, exotic and
utilitarian, brought affluence to a score of small New England ports and
provided specie and bills of exchange to balance the British account.
But the situation remained precarious until the outbreak of the French
Revolutionary wars disrupted normal channels and gave a providential
opportunity to a neutral trader. Britain was forced to look to North
America for timber, flour and, as her industrialisation proceeded,
increasing quantities of cotton and other raw materials as well as for
markets for her manufactures ; and a large part of the carrying trade of
beleagured European countries fell into American hands. Between
1790 and 1807 American exports rose from $20 to $108 million, of which
re-exports jumped from practically nothing to over half, and the
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American merchant marine grew to over a million tons. These prosper-
ous years established the United States as an important maritime nation.
However, this prosperity, the artificial by-product of war, was also
put in jeopardy by war. After Trafalgar, blockade and counter-
blockade subjected ships flying the American flag to ever more stringent
regulation; and since the British commanded the seas, it was the British
system with which the Americans came most into conflict. The seizure
of American ships and cargoes and the impressment at sea of British-
born American citizens for the Royal Navy so affronted American
opinion (though tolerated by merchants who, despite the risks involved,
made money from the trade), that Jefferson’s administration attempted
retaliatory measures. The non-intercourse policy pursued after 1807
ruined trade and exposed American shipping to a devastating spolia-
tion from both British and French, but was sufficiently successful in
starving British industry of markets and raw materials to force a re-
consideration of the Orders in Council on the eve of war in 1812.
Despite the inconclusiveness of the Treaty of Ghent (24 December
1814) which terminated the War of 1812, this lesson of the new import-
ance of the American connection for the British economy was not
altogether forgotten by either the British or the American Govern-
ment. On the return of peace the United States, under John Quincy
Adams, continued to pursue, now from a position of greater strength,
a policy appropriate to a primary producing and trading nation, of
breaking down the barriers to her overseas trade on the basis of
reciprocity. As far as direct trade with the United Kingdom was
concerned, discriminatory rates for goods and ships were abolished in
1815; but the full rigours of the Navigation Code remained in force
against American entry to Canada and the British West Indies, and it
was only after the United States retaliated by prohibiting goods from
entering American ports in United Kingdom ships in 1820 that Britain
began to re-consider her policy. In 1822 pressure from West Indian
interests and from British manufacturers worried about their newly
important American markets led Lord Liverpool and the Liberal Tories
to contemplate that liberalisation of commercial policy which lay behind
Canning’s approach towards the United States in 1823. The negotia-
tions for free American entry to the British West Indies were protracted;
but their success in 1830 marks a triumph for free trade interests
in both countries, in Britain of manufacturers, in the United States of
Southern planters and the merchants of New York, Philadelphia and
New England, all conscious of the potential of the Atlantic economy.
It is ironic, however, that at the moment when American economic
power at last forced Britain to recognise the virtues of Atlantic free
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trade, other voices in the United States were advocating a conflicting
policy. Within six months of his famous Message to Congress, Monroe
signed a tariff bill which substantially increased the duties on imported
textiles; and this was the precursor of an even more rigorously pro-
tective tariff, passed in 1828, two years before the freeing of the West
Indies.
Lancashire was the key to the development of the Gulf States; for
the upper Mississippi valley, however, there was no easy solution to the
problem of markets. There was some sale of provisions down river to
feed the plantations; but commercial farming on any scale awaited
practicable transport for wheat and flour, salt pork and timber pro-
ducts which would enable Kentucky and Ohio to take advantage of the
urban markets of the eastern seaboard. Western politicians clamoured
for such ‘internal improvements’. For their part, the merchants of
the rival ports of Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore
competed with transport schemes for the prize of annexing the West
to their hinterlands. The National Road, built by the Federal Govern-
ment through the Alleghenies to Wheeling on the Ohio, could not
handle bulk cargoes. In the age of Brindley and Bridgewater the
solution appeared to be canals to cut the watershed between the Ohio
or Great Lakes and the Atlantic-flowing rivers. From the 1780’s when
Washington and his friends promoted a canal to link the Potomac with
the Kanahwa many projects were attempted ; but success came eventually
to the State of New York which between 1817 and 1825 dug the Erie
Canal across comparatively level country between Lake Erie and the
Hudson River. This great waterway, which cut the cost of transporting
a bushel of wheat between Buffalo and Albany from $108 to $7, not
only opened the wheat-growing lands of western New York to immedi-
ate settlement but brought the whole Great Lakes basin and with it the
fertile northern parts of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois within the economy
of the Northeast. Cheap western flour on Boston market put the
Vermont farmer out of business and sent him west by canal barge and
ship along with European immigrants to settle in the Northwest, whose
commercial future was now assured.
The Northwest’s object, however, unlike that of the cotton States,
was a domestic, not an overseas market. As Henry Clay, her chief
spokesman, was quick to point out, the inflated demand for American
flour which obtained in Europe during the decades of war was not
likely to be maintained after the return of peace, a prediction confirmed
by the introduction of the British Corn Law of 1815 which virtually
excluded foreign grains until home-grown corn reached famine prices.
Fortunately for the Northwest, however, the rapidly growing urban
population of the ports and a few inland towns provided a ready and
less speculative alternative. It also offered an attractive political
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programme. The Northeast must be encouraged to grow as an industrial
economy to substitute for that of Britain, providing a market for
western produce and a domestic source of manufactures. Henry Clay’s
‘American System’, with its quadruple points, cheap land, ‘internal
improvements’ in transport, a national bank to provide credit, and a
protective tariff for manufactures, was a programme designed to
develop systematically a self-contained, national economy.
‘The American System’ depended on the feasibility of rapid in-
dustrialisation in New England. In advocating this, Clay was only
building upon the foundations of economic policy conceived by his
brilliant predecessor Alexander Hamilton, whose ambition it had been
to make the Republic a strong mercantile country on the model of
Great Britain.
The Founding Fathers had already ensured at Philadelphia that the
powers of the States should be so restricted and those of the central
government so strengthened as to establish one single, continental
economy without internal tariff barriers, with courts enforcing contracts
under a common commercial law and with a common fiscal and
monetary system. As secretary of the treasury, Hamilton gave definition
and force to these conditions in a bundle of radical measures. By
imposing a revenue tariff, by funding Federal and State securities at par
and by establishing a national bank which he justified by a novel,
broad construction of the power, in the Constitution, to control
commerce, he married the commercial interest to the constitution,
expanded credit and invited that return of European investment into
American ventures which was essential to capital development; and in
forcing through Jay’s Treaty he did what he could to re-establish
commercial relations with Britain.
All this was in the best interests of a primary producing and mer-
cantile country. Yet, though a reader of Adam Smith, Hamilton
remained mercantilist enough to believe that to be powerful the Republic
must also follow Britain in establishing a great manufacturing interest.
In his Report of Manufactures, he had argued, against the agrarians,
the virtues of industry with its increased productivity derived from the
division of labour, from machinery, capital and the mobilisation of
women and children, and he proposed a protective tariff behind which
the new manufactures could be established. He was too sanguine; and
the coalition of agrarian and overseas trading interests which defeated
his tariff proposals was more realistic in its assessment of the advantages
of exchanging American primary products for British low-cost manu-
factures. The failure of the Society for Useful Manufactures, which
attempted a variety of manufactures at the falls of the Passaic river in
New Jersey, demonstrated that Americans must import technology and
technicians, accumulate capital on an ambitious scale, and raise tariffs
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against the cheap manufactures of Britain, before they could domesticate
the new industries.
However, Hamilton was only a little before his time. Within a genera-
tion of his death in 1803 all three conditions had been partially achieved.
Already in 1790 at Providence, Rhode Island, Samuel Slater had
managed to build from memory the spinning frames he had operated
for Jedediah Strutt in Derbyshire. Following him across the Atlantic
travelled a clandestine but vitally important succession of weavers and
spinners from the Pennines to perform, in the water-driven mills of
Rhode Island, the rudimentary processes of textile manufacture. From
the start American inventiveness improved on British example, as in the
case of the functional Mississippi steamboat with its high-pressure
engine. There were also signs of a distinctly American approach to
manufacture. The shortage of skills and high cost of ‘help’ in a country
of plentiful farm land encouraged the capital-intensive use of machinery
which could be minded by unskilled hands. Oliver Evans’s automatic
flour mill of 1785 had halved the cost of labour; by 1800 that ingenious
Connecticut Yankee Eli Whitney had perfected the technique of making
muskets by assembling interchangeable parts which demanded machine
tools and pointed the way to mass production; and during the war boom
of 1813 Francis Lowell, cadet of the Boston merchant family, designed
the first large-scale, rationalised factory in which the pinafored farm
girls whom he lodged in model boarding houses performed all the pro-
cesses of manufacturing coarse, standardised cottons for farm wear.
Capital was painfully accumulated out of profits; but by 1830 Lowell’s
Boston Associates, an incorporated public company controlling not
only textile factories but marketing outlets, real estate, water power and
insurance companies, was a more advanced and powerful unit than any
in Lancashire. Though exceptional it demonstrated that the cotton
industry had become domesticated on the western shores of the Atlantic
nearer its source of raw materials and its American market. ‘The lords of
the lash and the lords of the loom’ were already in working partnership.
None of this would have come about without the almost inadvertent
protection of the domestic market which resulted from the disruption of
trade during the Napoleonic blockades. Jefferson’s non-intercourse
policy, followed by the War of 1812, ruined overseas commerce but shut
out British manufactures. The resulting shortage of consumers’ goods
caused a boom not only in mill, cottage and foundry enterprise but in
the new textile industry. Much of this mushroom growth failed to
survive the flooding-in of cheap British wares after the Treaty of
Ghent; but enough firms persisted in the coarser lines of manufacture
in textiles, ironware and other trades to form the nucleus of a lobby
demanding protection by Congress. The result was a series of tariffs
in 1816, 1818, 1824 and 1829 which progressively raised ad valorem
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rates from 25 per cent to as much in some cases as 45 per cent. The
‘Tariff of Abominations’ of 1828 was a freak tariff but demonstrates
the rise of a powerful manufacturing interest. Especially significant
was the apostacy of Daniel Webster, senator for Massachusetts, once
the eloquent spokesman for New England shipping interests, who,
sensing a shift in the predominant interest of his State, embraced pro-
tection and ardently supported the Tariff of 1828. By 1828 Henry
Clay’s ‘American System’ was a practical programme of economic
nationalism to counteract agrarian free trade in the counsels of the
Republic.
The Mississippi valley radically altered the balance, and exaggerated
the sectional character, of national politics. The establishment of a
constitution with a strong central government had not fundamentally
modified the geographic bias of politics. In the Republic’s first years,
before the West had to be reckoned with, the lines of political allegiance
were roughly drawn between north-east and south-west, between the
maritime and commercial interests and those of the frontier and plant-
ing, between Atlantic and continental, mercantile and agrarian, with
cross-lines which drew northern up-country farmers and the popular
element in the ports towards the south and great planters towards the
merchant princes of the north. The Federalist Party under Hamilton
and Adams and the Democratic-Republican Party under Jefferson and
Madison provided an effective counterpoint in which all the principal
voices were heard. In domestic affairs, the Federalists preached strong,
central control in the interests of systematic commercial development,
the Republicans State autonomy in the interests of rural self-sufficiency.
Foreign affairs, which after 1795 came to dominate national politics,
sharpened the issues between the parties and underlined deep tempera-
mental contrasts between planting and mercantile communities. Both
parties remained deeply convinced of the need to isolate the Republic
from European conflicts; but self-sufficient farmers and primary pro-
ducers, who could sell tobacco and later cotton at the dock-side to
foreign ships, could be more complacent about the disruption of com-
merce, more absolute in their isolationism, than overseas merchants
dependent for a livelihood on the carrying trade; and the gentry of
Virginia, educated in the liberal culture of the Enlightenment, were
more sympathetically drawn towards the principles of the French
Revolution than the more Calvinistic and Tory merchants, lawyers and
clergy of the Northeast for whom, after the Terror, England was the
defender of religion and morality, liberty and property against the
tyranny of the mob. This taking of sides produced a bitterness which
led the Federalists in 1798 to pass the Alien and Sedition Acts against
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the activities of allegedly seditious refugees, several of whom were
Republican publicists; and when President Jefferson tried to protect
American commerce from Algerian pirates with under-armed gun-
boats and in 1806 fell back on economic sanctions against Britain,
the Federalists thought these a frivolous sacrifice of their livelihood, and
were in no mood to rally patriotically in defence of the consequences.
The Northeast, not the South or the West, suffered from British impress-
ment of American seamen, but when war came in 1812 New England
opposed it bitterly; and in 1815 the New England Federalists, meeting
in convention at Hartford, upheld the right of States against the
Federal conduct of the war by resolutions which exposed them to the
charge of sedition.
The Federalist record in the War of 1812 gave the coup de grace to
a party which had steadily lost its hold over national politics. Under
Hamilton’s leadership, the Federalists had conducted themselves as a
party after the English fashion, with an articulate legislative programme
based on consistent principles and appealing to a coherent interest.
Although the Republic was fortunate in its formative years to have its
political habits given so forceful a direction, this style of politics proved
inappropriate to a federal system designed to give expression to a
multitude of disparate claims. Federalist acts provoked opposition
throughout the continent, which Jefferson, less consistent, prismatic,
luminous and sometimes devious, was temperamentally suited to
galvanise into political action. The anti-Federalist coalition of Virginia
planters, States’-rights men, up-country farmers, city mechanics and
Clinton and Burr’s benevolent Society of St Tammany in New York,
which Jefferson pieced together from the time of his famous botanical
excursion up the Hudson in 179 1 , proved, as the Democratic-Republican
Party, not only able to wrest power from the Federalists in the election
of 1800 but to be the first essentially American and national party com-
manding continent-wide support. After 1800 the Federalists were too
consistently mercantile in their appeal to attract the continental support
needed to capture an administration ; and since the rift between Adams
and Hamilton and the latter’s death in a political duel with Burr in
1803, the party had been little more than a New England rump. With
the return of peace ex-Federalists like John Quincy Adams looked for
national expression to the Republican Party which, in absorbing them,
took the name of National Republican and, under Monroe’s presid-
ency, became the only effective national party. The fact that for three
administrations thereafter the Federal Government was in the hands of
a single party has given the period down to 1828 the misleading name of
the Era of Good Feelings. In effect the National Republican Party was
little more than a holding operation until the time when the coalition
of interests composing it should break apart to form a new party
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alignment. This alignment was to be the result of the breakaway of the
new West from the old South.
Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun and Andrew Jackson had all been
bom to frontier families, two of them of Scots-Irish stock, living on
the slope of the Southern Appalachians. All three rose to prominence
as nationalists during the War of 1812, Jackson as the glorious con-
queror of the British at New Orleans, Clay and Calhoun as ‘War
Hawks’ in Congress and Clay as one of the American peace com-
missioners at Ghent; yet so strongly did the flood of settlement swirl
through the Appalachian valleys that it carried them along to fortune
and leadership in widely differing spheres. Jackson, senator from
Tennessee, was the darling of the pioneer West; Clay, senator from
Kentucky, the spokesman of the commercial Northwest; Calhoun,
moving south-east to tidewater, senator for South Carolina and
statesman of the Cotton South. Their careers epitomise the break-up
of the old Southwest into three regions with distinct voices in national
affairs.
The boom after the War of 1812 established cotton planting as the
dominant interest in Southern politics. Whereas the older, Jeffersonian
generation, pessimistic about the future of tobacco planting, had
manumitted slaves in their wills and had looked to an economic future
not very different from that of the mid-Atlantic States (even Calhoun
voted for the Tariff of 1816), a younger generation was wholeheartedly
committed to planting and slave-holding and the idiosyncratic way of
life that this entailed. Leadership passed from the Virginia dynasty
with their liberal and national outlook to the cotton oligarchy of
Charleston, South Carolina, with a narrow, more legalistic view of its
special interest. This meant protecting slavery and promoting cotton
in Federal policy. By 1820 the Cotton South was in entrenched opposi-
tion to the tariff, a national bank, national roads and canals and to a
cheap land policy, all of which it was felt would benefit North and
West at her expense. Above all, the South was newly conscious of the
need to reinforce the constitutional protection of her peculiar in-
stitution. With population in the free States outstripping that of the
South, it was ever more imperative to preserve the equality of slave
against free States in the Senate. A Northern proposal in 1820 to admit
Missouri as a State with slavery prohibited brought about a major
crisis in Congress, only resolved by a compromise whereby Maine was
admitted as a free and Missouri as a slave State and slavery was ex-
cluded from the Louisiana Territory north of the line 36° 30'. This
compromise held the issue uneasily in check for twenty-five years; but
served notice on the nation that the South demanded special accom-
modation for its peculiar interest. As the aged Jefferson remarked, it
was a ‘firebell in the night’.
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The defection of the seaboard South emphasised the arrival of the
Mississippi valley as a separate interest in the nation. The westward-
looking back-country communities had a few, simple claims to make in
Washington: Federal protection from, and removal of, Indian tribes,
the cheapest possible terms for title to the lands of the public domain,
and Federal aid for transport improvements; otherwise they wished to
be left alone to grow up with the country, without restraints from the
eastern seaboard such as that control over credit inflation which the
United States Bank was beginning to exert from Philadelphia. Yet in the
booming ’twenties this old, frontier West, which sent Jackson to the
Senate, was rapidly growing up. The colonisation of cotton and sugar
planting in the lower Valley identified the Gulf States with the Old
South as part of the planting interest; and north of the Ohio the
possibilities of commercial farming were turning the Northwest towards
Henry Clay and to those proposals for union with the Northeast which
harmonised so well with those of the ex-Federalists of New England
who would soon be called Whigs. Neither of these tendencies had yet
achieved sufficient definition to detract from the power of Jackson’s
image as frontier hero, and he acquired a bare plurality of electoral
votes over John Quincy Adams, Clay or Crawford (Calhoun was
elected vice-president) in the presidential election of 1824; but he was
not elected president on this occasion because Clay persuaded the
Kentucky representatives in the House to vote for Adams, who became
the last president of the National Republican dynasty. Before Jackson
was to succeed to this office the West would come to be felt, not merely
as a new section, but as an influence pervading the political system as a
whole.
Hitherto, despite the magic of the Declaration of Independence,
republicanism had been by no means synonymous with democracy.
The Federalists who had put through the new constitution had been
acting to restore the balance of interests in favour of property and
oligarchy in opposition to levelling tendencies. Though few were so
reactionary as the jurist James Kent and the Essex Junto, who were
Tories as high as it was possible for republicans to be, most wished to
keep political power in the safe hands of birth and breeding. Even
Jefferson, though he differed from Hamilton in preferring land to funds
as the basis for a moral Republic, equally believed that political rights
must depend on property; and designed accordingly his University of
Virginia, with its domed library and pilastered rooms flanked by slave
quarters, for young gentlemen who might be talented rather than well-
born but would be recruits for an aristocratic elite. Most States had
substantial property-qualifications for office-holding, as high as
£10,000 for the governorship of South Carolina, and in the very great
majority of them property remained the basis of the vote. With few
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exceptions, notably the populistic City of New York controlled by
Tammany Hall, politics were monopolised by propertied connections
in an eighteenth-century style. Affairs were manipulated in caucus by
gentlemen in tie wigs who knew each other’s minds. It appeared an age
of good feelings partly because its manners were well bred.
The Mississippi valley changed this. The Americans who moved
west temperamentally rejected the constraints of an inherited life and
looked to a better, freer existence over a western horizon. The often
harsh conditions of the back-country gave a new, crisis quality to social
relations. Squire and parson stayed east of the mountains; family
connexions and letters of credit counted for less than more immediate
human qualities in the chances of survival. Although the migrants
carried in their baggage the Bible, Blackstone, Shakespeare and Noah
Webster, and had the habits of vestry or town meeting, they were forced
to improvise and adapt. Society meant the neighbourhood and, where
there were few extremes of wealth yet most owned land, a sawmill or a
tavern, property ceased to be a test of responsibility. In the back-
country equality seemed a self-evident absolute and it was natural that
new States should enter the Union with virtually manhood suffrage.
This egalitarian temper directly infected the more newly-settled
regions of seaboard States such as New York which had its own West
in the booming Finger Lakes district opened up by the Erie Canal, and
indirectly encouraged artisans, shopkeepers and small men in general
to demand the vote. The seaboard communities, and particularly the
ports of Philadelphia, New York and Boston which were rapidly grow-
ing in population, began to show signs of restiveness under the policies
of the oligarchs who controlled city and State affairs. For if State inter-
ests opposed Federal intervention in economic matters, the same
prejudice did not extend to internal affairs which were still conducted
on robustly mercantilist principles. The demand for rapid economic
development, which in practice meant transport improvements, in a
country with exiguous capital resources, could only be met by direct
State action. From Virginia to Massachusetts turnpikes, bridges, canals
and other works were built either by direct government undertakings or
by chartered monopolies ; and the influence of mercantile syndicates with
State legislatures in acquiring such privileges came to be suspect,
particularly in times of trade depression when artisans were unemployed
and their efforts to combine frustrated under the common law of
conspiracy by courts prejudiced in favour of property. To break the
supposed hold of privilege over economic life, mechanics and small
traders and ‘manufacturers’ outside the charmed circle of mercantile
family groups on whom they depended for credit, turned to the novel
weapon of the franchise. In response to popular pressure eastern States
liberalised their constitutions, removing property qualifications, as in
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Massachusetts in 1820 and New York in 1821, abolishing religious tests
and relating constituencies more numerically to population. Politicians
had to reckon with a new, swollen electorate, democratic in temper,
with a grudge against caucus politics and sanguine about the prospects
of removing grievances by means of the vote. It was to this ill-instructed,
populistic electorate that Jackson, a national hero, made an irresistible
appeal; and his election to the presidency in 1828 by an overwhelming
popular vote represented the victory, not merely of the west but of a
new, democratic America which chafed at the tight controls of the old
Republican regime. It was a political revolution.
The shifting interests of politics were held in balance within a con-
stitution which commanded from its inception a remarkable loyalty but
which had uncertain implications concerning the boundary of powers
between the Federal Government and the States. The assertion of a
strong, central authority was countered by that concern for the rights
of States which had led Virginia to insist on the attachment of the
Bill of Rights to the Constitution. Hamilton’s broad construction of
the commerce power to justify the establishment of a national bank was
vigorously challenged, then and later, by those who were jealous for
State authority. This conflict concerned not merely a definition of
powers; but the underlying theory of sovereignty. Was the Republic
an indissoluble Union created by the people of the United States as a
whole, or a compact between States? This ambiguity was brought into
the open whenever a State or group of States felt its fundamental
interests to be threatened by Federal policy. In 1798 the Alien and
Sedition Acts, which were aimed at the Republicans, were denounced
in Jeffersonian States as unconstitutional. The Kentucky and Virginia
Resolves protesting against them invoked the compact theory and
asserted the right to States to judge infractions of the Constitution; the
second Kentucky resolution claimed ‘that a nullification of those
sovereignties, of all unauthorised acts done under the colour of that
instrument, is the rightful remedy’. Similarly in different circumstances,
the Federalists at the Hartford Convention, believing the fundamental
interests of New England to be threatened by the conduct of the war,
asserted that ‘in cases of deliberate, dangerous and palpable infractions
of the Constitution affecting the sovereignty of a State and liberties of
the people, it is not only the right but the duty of such a State to
interpose its authority for their protection. . . .’ In each case the crisis
passed; but the doctrine of nullification, based on the compact theory,
was to persist to justify extraordinary measures to defend the greatest
of all interests, cotton, and by implication, slavery, in the crisis of 1832.
Nullification was an extreme and doubtful theory; but throughout the
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period advocates of States’ rights strongly resisted the efforts of the
Federal Government to extend its authority.
This conflict centred on the claims of the Federal Supreme Court to
an overriding jurisdiction extending to the power to decide whether
acts of private citizens. States or the Federal Government itself were
or were not in accordance with the Constitution and thereby to expound
the nature of the Constitution itself. In its first decade the United
States Supreme Court had performed a subordinate and largely in-
effective role; but a re-organisation during their last months of office in
1801 permitted the outgoing Federalists to reinforce the power and
Federalist character of the court, notably by the appointment of the
Virginia Federalist and secretary of state, John Marshall, as chief
justice. This highly political manoeuvring was challenged by the
incoming Republicans; but though Jefferson succeeded in having
Justice Chase impeached he was unable to make headway against the
court itself and especially against its remarkable chief justice whose
appointment left a doughty champion of central power in Washington
at the moment of Federalist eclipse. Under Marshall’s leadership the
court assumed the central and dominant position it was ever after to
hold in the constitutional framework. Though no learned jurist,
Marshal] during thirty years on the bench developed the doctrine of
judicial review in a score of leading cases to extend the supremacy of
the national government against the States and to delineate the Con-
stitution as an indissoluble Union which derived its sovereignty from
the people as a whole.
From the start the Marshallian court made categorically clear the
underlying nature of the Constitution. ‘The Constitution of the United
States’, in an opinion by Justice Story, ‘was ordained and established,
not by the States in their sovereign capacities, but emphatically, as the
preamble of the Constitution declares, by “the people of the United
States” ’; and Marshall himself
That the United States form, for many and for most important purposes, a single
nation, has not yet been denied. In war we are one people. In making peace we are
one people. In all commercial regulations we are one and the same people. In
many other respects the American people are one; and the government which is
alone capable of controlling and managing their interests in all these respects is the
government of the Union.
And building on these premises Marshall reinforced the authority of
the Federal Government, and of the Supreme Court. He established
the right of the court to judicial review in Marbury v. Madison (1803)
by declaring an Act of Congress unconstitutional; and in Cohens v.
Virginia (1821) when he insisted that the decisions of State courts were
subject to review by the Supreme Court. In McCulloch v. Maryland
(1819) he built on Hamilton’s doctrine of implied powers to uphold the
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constitutionality of the United States Bank. In Gibbons v. Ogden
(1824), by denying the validity of a State-chartered steamboat
monopoly on the Hudson between New York and New Jersey, he
revolutionised the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce.
In Fletcher v. Peck (1810) he upheld the right of contract even when
one of the parties was a State Legislature, and in Dartmouth College v.
Woodward (1819) he held that the College’s charter was a contract
which could not subsequently be impaired by the legislature, a decision
fraught with significance for future business corporations. Marshall’s
decisions, throughout his career, were unpopular and met with protest
from lawyers and politicians alike, especially from the Jeffersonian
Republicans and advocates of States’ rights; but in general, the judicial
framework which he established was never successfully challenged.
In taking their stand on the abstract rights of Englishmen, the
American Revolutionaries had been forced to resist the instinctive,
quasi-tribal loyalties binding them to the British community; indeed the
Revolution was in one sense an attempt to break away from European
nationalism, which was identified with tyranny. The institutions of the
Republic evoked a fierce pride and a belief that America represented a
virtuous future, Europe a corrupt past. Engravings of State capitols,
the United States Bank, the Philadelphia waterworks, the model State
penitentiary at Auburn and the Erie Canal proudly represented re-
publican equivalents to Windsor Castle, Westminster Abbey and the
Tower of London; and from Philadelphia to Rochester on the New
York fringe of civilisation, banks, exchanges and villas were built in
that Greek Revival style which Jefferson, the architect, had introduced
in preference to the English colonial and which, like the town-names
Rome, Syracuse, Ithaca and Athens identified Americans with the cause
of Greek independence and gave a classical cachet to republican
principles in the New World wilderness.
However, a government of laws and not of men was an abstract
object of patriotic devotion, capable of kindling emotion in the breast
of a philosopher like Joseph Priestley in his Susquehanna retreat, but
hardly the intimate, earthy affections of ordinary men. And so
Americans gave their warmest allegiance, not to the distant and aloof
Federal Government, but to State and region. Even for Jefferson
‘my country’ meant Virginia; and when New England congressmen,
after weeks of arduous travel, reached Washington they eyed their
stylish, drawling colleagues from the plantations with suspicion as
foreigners.
If culture was regional it remained provincial, even colonial. New
Englanders hated Britain for her politics but called England ‘home’
and conducted business in pounds, shillings and pence. Manners were
republican; but fashions and furnishings, when they were not the spoils
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of a Chinese trading voyage, were Federalist, that is to say a domestic
version of Empire or Regency. Although the great religious ‘Awaken-
ings’ of 1800 and 1826, which swept like prairie fire through the back-
country, gave a camp-meeting intensity to evangelism, the Churches
followed the lead of Clapham and the English Cambridge in establish-
ing the full apparatus of Bible, tract, temperance and peace societies on
the British model of spiritual imperialism. Americans took pride in
their common schooling and in their remarkable literacy of speech and
writing expressed in abundant newsprint and the lexicographic stand-
ards of Noah Webster; but they read Scott, Byron, Wordsworth and
Jane Austen in the pirated editions which, it seemed, were a republican
privilege; and Joel Barlow’s attempt at a republican epic was written
in pale, derivative and outmoded heroic couplets.
Yet within twenty years of Barlow’s Columbiad, Fenimore Cooper
and Washington Irving were writing in a spirit recognisably American.
This new American consciousness owed much to emanations from the
land itself. Irving’s evocation of the ghosts of Dutchmen on the
Hudson, the upper reaches of which were depicted in a golden light by
the Hudson river school of painters, and above all the forest fife and
American characterisation of Cooper successfully transmuted the
temper of the romantic movement into American experience. With a
violent climate, continental distances and hidden dangers from man and
beast, nature could never be the intimate, familiar experience of the
Lakeland poets; but as Americans turned inland they invested with
grandeur and sublimity the mountainous wilderness of the Appala-
chians, and the rivers, forests and prairies beyond, and as they identified
themselves with it those who went west became more self-consciously
American.
The West acted in other ways to foster a national consciousness.
Experience in more primitive communities simplified the habits and
rounded the edges of Pennsylvanians and Virginians who came to think
of themselves as Americans first and State citizens only second.
Territories looked to Washington for government and when they
became States the Stars and Stripes continued to stir emotions which
the new, contrived State flag could not rouse. And the brash, exuberant,
undisciplined temperament of the frontier lent itself to an aggressive
nationalism whenever westerners found foreigners blocking their path.
In particular, as settlers moved north-west towards the Great Lakes,
keeping to forests and shunning the unknown open prairies, they came
increasingly to resent the power of Britain in Upper Canada. Canada,
which stood in the way of an American destiny, must be annexed, if
necessary by force of arms.
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Hatred of Britain was the earliest and the most primitive force
shaping American nationalism. The inspiring memory of comradeship
in arms during the long, discouraging Revolutionary War gave
Americans their most highly-charged tradition, kept alive after 1783 by
the existence of Britain in Canada and an uneasy conviction that there
was unfinished business with the old enemy. Jay’s Treaty, with its
humiliating price for the evacuation of western posts, was an arrogant
affront. The long years of the British continental blockade kept nerves
frayed while United States merchantmen were forced into British ports
and His Majesty’s frigates cruised in wait within sight of Long Island;
and the impressment of British-born citizens on the high seas by Royal
Navy captains, in their contempt for certificates of naturalisation, defied
the whole unique concept of American nationality and stirred the old
revolutionary patriotism to a new intensity. The violent feeling which
pushed the Republic into war with Britain in 1812 at the moment when
the British were relaxing their pressure on American commerce was the
expression of a new and strident nationalism which transcended the
immediate issues involved. New England, which had suffered most,
responded least. The clamour for war was not maritime but continental,
and it was voiced in Congress by War Hawks like Calhoun, represent-
ing the South, and more especially by Henry Clay, the spokesman of a
Northwest intent on annexing Canada.
The War of 1812 settled none of the specific issues which caused it,
and it is doubtful who won it. But psychologically it was a triumphant
experience for the American people. The humiliations, the landings of
Royal Marines, the burning of the President’s mansion, were expunged
in American eyes by successful actions on the Great Lakes and above
all by the resounding defeat of Pakenham’s Peninsular veterans by
Jackson’s force at New Orleans in 1815. It is misleading to think of the
War as the final stage in the struggle for independence; but this last
bloodletting with the old enemy, fought however desultorily on a
continental front stretching from the Gulf to the Great Lakes, made
Americans conscious that they were not only a republic but a nation.
Francis Scott Key, as he watched the Union flag at Fort McHenry
survive the battering of a British bombardment, caught the new mood
in verses which, set to music by an English composer, provided a
republican nation with a national anthem.
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THE EMANCIPATION OF LATIN AMERICA
I ate in November 1807 a French army under General Junot
crossed the frontiers of Portugal. Early in the morning of the
-/29th the prince regent, later King John VI, his demented mother.
Queen Maria I, his termagant wife. Car lota Joaquina, the daughter of
Charles IV of Spain, the rest of the royal family, and an immense crowd
of courtiers, set sail from the Tagus to seek refuge in Brazil. The fleet,
convoyed by British warships and carrying a great quantity of treasure,
was dispersed by storm. Some of the vessels made Rio de Janeiro on
15 January. The prince regent himself, however, first touched Brazilian
soil at Bahia six days later, and there, on the 28th, he issued the famous
Carta Regia declaring the ports of Brazil open to the trade of all friendly
nations. Once more embarking, he reached Rio de Janeiro on 7 March,
to land, amid scenes of great enthusiasm, on the following day.
The effects of this royal hegira, of the arrival of the court, and of the
opening of the ports, were immediate and profound. An impulse of
fresh and vigorous life was transfused throughout the colony. ‘New
people, new capital, and ideas entered.’ 1 A bank was founded, a
printing press introduced, a royal library opened, a gazette established.
Foreigners were invited to enter the country, industry was encouraged.
European diplomats, English merchants, German scientists, even a
colony of Chinese tea-planters arrived at Rio de Janeiro, now the British
South American naval base as well as the metropolitan seat of govern-
ment. And while between native-born Brazilian and Portuguese
immigrant a bitter rivalry, the fruit of an old antipathy, soon became
evident, Brazilians in their own eyes and in those of the world acquired
a new dignity, officially recognised when, in December 1815, the colony
was elevated to the status of a kingdom, co-equal with the Kingdom of
Portugal.
The flight of the house of Braganza from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro
began the process which culminated, fourteen years later, in the almost
bloodless secession of Brazil from Portugal. And as the Napoleonic
invasion of Portugal thus led finally to the peaceful dissolution of the
Portuguese Empire in America, so the Napoleonic invasion of Spain
precipitated, except in the two islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico, the
violent dissolution of the Spanish Empire in America.
Portugal had been caught between the sea-power of England and the
1 A. K. Manchester, British Preeminence in Brazil. Its Rise and Decline (Chapel Hill,
1933), P- 72.
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land-power of France; and Spain had abetted France. By the Treaty of
Fontainebleau (27 October 1807), indeed, Charles IV and Napoleon
had agreed to divide between them both Portugal and the Portuguese
dominions. But, Portugal over-run, it was Spain’s turn next to pass
beneath the harrow. And whereas the Portuguese crown — and the
Portuguese fleet — had escaped the clutches of Napoleon, the Spanish
crown fell into captivity. On 19 March Charles IV abdicated in favour
of his son, Ferdinand VII. Four days later a French army under
Murat entered Madrid. In May both Charles and Ferdinand, lured by
Napoleon to Bayonne, were forced to renounce their rights. And on
6 June, by Napoleonic decree, hurriedly ratified by an ‘Assembly of
Notables’ convoked at Bayonne, Joseph Bonaparte was proclaimed
‘King of Spain and the Indies’.
But Napoleon reckoned without the Spanish love of independence.
On the famous day of 2 May 1808 the people of Madrid rose against the
French troops. This was the prelude to the national uprising against
the invader. In province after province juntas of resistance sprang into
life. In May the Junta of Asturias, and in June the Junta of Galicia and
the Junta of Seville (arrogantly assuming the title of ‘Supreme Govern-
mental Junta of Spain and the Indies’) declared war on France and sent
deputies to England. On 4 July peace with Spain was formally pro-
claimed in London, and eight days later the expedition which Sir
Arthur Wellesley had been preparing at Cork for the invasion of
northern South America sailed to liberate, not Spanish America from
Spain, but Portugal and Spain from France. As, wrote Castlereagh on
20 June, ‘by the insurrection in the Asturias, some probability of
restoring the Spanish monarchy is revived ... it is wished to suspend
any measure tending to divide and therefore to weaken that monarchy.’ 1
Henceforth, so far as Britain was concerned, ideas of liberation in
Spanish America, like those of conquest, were officially renounced.
Spain, like Portugal, had become the ally of England, united in a
common cause. In the event of the subjugation of Spain, wrote Castle-
reagh in August, Britain ‘would coniine her views to forming such a
connexion with the Spanish dominions in South America as might be
best calculated to protect their independence and resources against the
designs of the common enemy’; 2 and Canning, at the Foreign Office,
laid it down in September that England could countenance no designs
hostile to the Spanish colonies. 3
The news of the invasion of the mother country, of the fall of the
monarchy, and of the Spanish rising en masse reached northern South
1 Charles Vane, Marquess of Londonderry, Memoirs and Correspondence of Viscount
Castlereagh (12 vols., London, 1848-53), vol. vi, p. 375.
8 Castlereagh to Admiral Sir Sidney Smith, 4 August 1808. Public Record Office, F.O.
72/91.
5 Canning to Strangford, 2 September 1808. F.O. 63/59.
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America in July and New Spain and the Rio de la Plata in August. It
provoked an explosion of loyal indignation. Funds were raised to help
the patriot cause. The agents of Napoleon, who soon appeared — the
Marquis de Sassenay at Buenos Aires, Lieutenant Paul de Lamanon at
Caracas — were coldly received and quickly expelled, Sassenay to be
imprisoned at Montevideo, Lamanon to fall into the hands of the captain
of the British frigate Acasta. The loud demands of the Princess Carlota
Joaquina at Rio de Janeiro to be recognised as the legal representative
of the Spanish royal house were similarly ignored. Little that was good,
in Spanish American eyes, could come out of Rio de Janeiro. And
though in the Rio de la Plata Carlota did indeed acquire a certain
following and her intrigues did more to stimulate a revolutionary spirit
than to allay it, there, as everywhere else in Spanish America, from New
Spain to Chile, the authority of the captive king, Ferdinand VII, was
loyally proclaimed.
But Ferdinand was a king without a crown, and the royal officials in
America — the peninsular bureaucracy which formed the civil service of
the empire — were left without a master. In Spain itself a Central Junta
was, with some difficulty, formed in the king’s name at Aranjuez in
September 1808, only to be forced to flee to Seville two months later.
There, in January 1809, it issued a royal decree declaring that the Spanish
dominions in the Indies were not colonies but an integral part of the
Spanish monarchy and, as such, entitled to representation in the junta.
But the junta’s life was short. In January 1810, as the French armies
overran Andalusia, it again took flight, this time to the island of Leon,
and here it dissolved, leaving in its place a Regency of Five instructed to
summon a Cortes which should represent both Spain and America.
Meanwhile, the structure of colonial government, already subjected
to severe strain — an unanticipated effect of the Bourbon administrative
reforms — during the closing decades of the eighteenth century, showed
signs of collapse. While some of the royal officials, preferring any king
to none, were suspected of collaborationist sympathies with the rey
intruso, Joseph Bonaparte, Spaniards, in this crisis of authority, looked
with suspicion on Spaniards, and the age-old antagonism between
creoles and peninsulares, Spaniards born in America and Spaniards
born in Spain, flared into open strife. In New Spain the cabildo, or
town council, of Mexico City, representing the creoles, and the audiencia,
or high court, representing the peninsulares, each sought to impose its
will on the viceroy. In the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata, where the
British invasions of 1806-7 bad sowed the seeds of revolution and
fertilized the soil, the enmity between Governor filio of Montevideo
and Viceroy Liniers at Buenos Aires, superimposed on the jealousy
which each city felt for the other, led to the temporary secession of
Montevideo from the rest of the viceroyalty, and Buenos Aires itself,
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in 1808 and 1809, was the scene of a struggle both of Spaniard against
Spaniard and of Spaniard against creole. In Upper Peru the Audiencia
of Charcas, long at odds with its president, who was also the Intendant
of La Plata, deposed and imprisoned him in May 1809. At La Paz, in
the same presidency, creoles and mestizos, in July, overthrew the local
bishop and the local intendant, declaring that the time had come to
‘organize a new system of government’ and ‘to raise the standard of
liberty in these unfortunate colonies’. 1 And at Quito, in the Viceroyalty
of New Granada, the creole aristocracy in August rose in revolt against
its peninsular governors though warmly protesting its loyalty to the
crown.
These cracks in the fabric of colonial government were, temporarily,
repaired. A new viceroy, appointed by the Central Junta in Spain,
arrived in the Rio de la Plata, and Montevideo returned to its allegiance.
A new president-intendant was sent to Charcas. Troops from Peru
crushed the rebellion at La Paz. The creoles of Quito were subdued.
Nor was it till the Central Junta itself collapsed that the full magnitude
of the imperial constitutional crisis, and, with it, of the crisis in the
relations between Spain and her colonies, was revealed.
The dominions overseas, the Central Junta had declared, in January
1809, were an integral part of the Spanish monarchy, and the deduction
followed that they owed obedience to the extraordinary authorities
established in Spain. But this had not been the Habsburg view of the
nature of the empire. Nor was it the American view. ‘ Estos y esos
reinos ’ (‘these and those kingdoms’) was the famous phrase used to
describe the royal possessions in Spain and the Indies. The kingdoms of
the New World had never belonged to Spain. They were the patrimony
of the crown of Castile, united to the kingdoms of Spain merely by a
dynastic tie. The Bourbons, in their desire to rationalise, to systematise,
and to centralise colonial government, had forgotten, or ignored, this
Habsburg view, and so had the Spaniards. But the creoles remembered
it, and, as the English colonies in the eighteenth century, victorious in
their struggle with the instruments of the royal prerogative, refused to
accept subordination to the sovereignty of parliament, so the Spanish
colonies, once the crown had disappeared, refused to accept subordina-
tion to the people of the peninsula.
Already in 1809, at Quito and Chuquisaca, and in other parts of the
empire also, the argument had been heard that Spaniards born in
America were just as much the guardians, or residuary legatees, of the
authority of the crown as Spaniards born in Spain and that the several
regions of the Americas had just as much right to establish provisional
governments of their own as had the several provinces of Spain. From
1 Ricardo Levene, Ensayo histdrico sobre la revolucidn de Mayo y Mariano Moreno
(3 vols., 2nd. ed., Buenos Aires, 1925), vol. 1, p. 303.
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this it was no long step to the further argument that since the crown had
fallen into captivity, since the legal government had ceased to exist,
sovereignty had reverted to the people, though by ‘the people’, it is
true, nothing more was meant than a small but active creole minority;
and to this doctrine of ‘popular sovereignty’, in origin quite as much a
conservative as a revolutionary doctrine, the news of the dissolution of
the Central Junta in Spain and of the apparent conquest of the peninsula
gave additional force. ‘The monarchy dissolved and Spain lost,’ wrote
Camilo Torres, one of the leaders of the revolutionary movement in
New Granada, ‘are we not in the position of children who come of age
at the death of the father of the family? Each one enters into the
enjoyment of his individual rights, sets up a new hearth, and governs
himself.’ 1
The insurrectionary movement that followed in South America began
as a revolt of the cities, or, rather, of the cabildos, those organs of
municipal government which, in some parts of the empire at least, had
been stimulated to a new activity during the later years of the eighteenth
century, and in which the creole aristocracy and professional class,
excluded generally from the higher offices of state, enjoyed some measure
of representation and authority. Semi-nationalist and semi-monarchist,
as compared with the nationalist and monarchist revolt which had
swept Spain two years earlier, it was essentially a movement for local
autonomy, the capital cities, for the most part, taking the lead, the pro-
vinces following or resisting; and it revealed at the outset a striking
unity of action. Beginning with an extraordinary meeting of the
cabildo of Caracas on 19 April 1810, when the Captain-General of
Venezuela was deposed, juntas and cabildos assumed the powers of
viceroys, governors, and captains-general : at Buenos Aires on 25 May;
in the Viceroyalty of New Granada at Cartagena early in June, and at
the viceregal capital, Santa Fe de Bogota, on 20 July; and at Santiago
de Chile in September. In each case these new authorities declared
their loyalty to the crown. It was not, indeed, till July 18 11 that
Venezuela proclaimed its independence, nor till July 1816 that the
Provinces of the Rio de la Plata took the same step. But the revolution
of 25 May 1810 at Buenos Aires, like that of 19 April 1810 at Caracas,
was in effect, if not in formal fact, a declaration of independence. It
was under the legal fiction of obedience to a captive crown that a move-
ment begun as an assertion of freedom from French control was trans-
formed into a war of independence from Spain.
That this transformation took place was in part due to the ineptitude
and bewilderment of the colonial authorities themselves. In part it was
the deliberate design of a small, intelligent creole minority, re-inforced
1 Jules Mancini, Bolivar et V Emancipation des Colonies Espagnoles des Origines d 1815
(Paris, 1912), p. 271.
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by some mestizo blood, which was determined ‘to supplant the
peninsular Spaniards in government and trade, and in whose hands
the ignorant classes were a ready tool for the accomplishment of their
aims’. 1 But partly also it was the result of the uncompromising hostility
of successive governments in Spain. For though the monarchy had
collapsed, though the peninsula had been over-run, liberals and con-
servatives in Spain still clung to the principles of imperial monopoly
and colonial subordination. The regency instituted a blockade of
Venezuela. The Cortes, which met on the island of Leon, under the
shadow of Cadiz, in September 1810, and produced the liberal con-
stitution of 1812, declared that the Spanish do mini ons of both hemi-
spheres formed a single monarchy, a single nation, and a single family,
and that Americans possessed the same rights as Europeans. But the
colonial demand for equality of representation within the Cortes was,
inevitably, denied. The colonial petition for freedom to trade with the
world at large was rejected. In all that concerned the dominions over-
seas, Americans and Filipinos on the one hand — at first represented
by thirty of their number resident in Cadiz — and the peninsular dele-
gates on the other were usually ranged on opposite sides. The Cortes
twice rejected an offer of British mediation between mother country
and colonies: it sought, indeed, not so much a reconciliation with the
insurgent provinces as their ‘unconditional submission by force of
arms’. 2 Spain, like Britain, was unable to conceive of a Commonwealth
of Nations united by allegiance to the crown. It did not need the
restoration of Ferdinand and despotism, in 1814, to make the inde-
pendence of Spanish America ultimately sure.
Except in Mexico (p. 634, below), the revolutions which broke out in
1810 were political revolutions. They aimed, not at the re-organisation
of society, but at the redistribution of authority, from Spaniards to
creoles. They looked also to the destruction of the commercial
monopoly of Spain and the opening of the continent to the trade of the
world. It was from Caracas and Buenos Aires, where foreign trade and
foreign influence had most deeply penetrated, that the revolutionary
movements in South America took their rise and drew their strength;
and in so far as these movements completed the transition, begun by the
illicit trade of Spain’s colonial rivals, from the closed to the open door,
they cradled an economic revolution. But they stopped short at the
point at which they might have cradled a social revolution. They opened
wider horizons to the Spaniards born in America. The mestizo, the
man of mixed blood, also gained, though not the American Indian, and
1 C. H. Haring, The Spanish Empire in America (New York, 1947), p. 346.
* Sir Henry Wellesley to Castlereagh, Cadiz, 5 July 1812. Sir Charles K. Webster, ed.,
Britain and the Independence of Latin America, 1812-30. Select Documents from the Foreign
Office Archives (2 vols., London, 1938), vol. n, p. 330.
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negro slavery and the slave trade were everywhere restricted or abolished.
But it was a demonstration of the strength of the traditional order that,
though creoles had stepped into the shoes of Spaniards, and though
political institutions had been shaped anew, in most areas, but more
particularly in the rural and Indian areas, the structure of colonial
society at the close of the wars of independence had been little changed.
The economic organisation of Spanish America, on the other hand,
like its administrative organisation, lay in ruins. The wars of inde-
pendence were civil wars. Creoles fought Spaniards, but Spanish
Americans also fought each other. Separatists and loyalists — the latter
proportionately far more numerous than the loyalists in the mainland
colonies of England during the war of North American independence —
alike exploited the illiterate masses, and the struggle once begun released
incalculable forces, was waged with a savage intensity, and left desola-
tion in its train. Its consuming fires spread from one end of the con-
tinent to the other, and in parts of South America the agony endured for
fifteen years. A few regions — Paraguay was one. Central America
another — escaped comparatively lightly. On the waters of the Rio de la
Plata, Buenos Aires, like its great province of the same name, quickly
responded to the new currents of foreign trade. In Chile the port of
Valparaiso was revolution’s child. But the Banda Oriental, 1 and some
of the interior provinces of what was to become Argentina, suffered
heavily. The high plateau of Upper Peru, the modem Bolivia, was
constantly a battlefield. So also was Venezuela, where tens of thousands
perished by the lance and by the sword. And though the extent of the
damage varied from region to region, in general the economic life of
Spanish America was disrupted and the prosperity which had marked
the closing years of the colonial era destroyed. Trade routes were
abandoned, mines deserted, crops and livestock laid waste, the labour
supply was dislocated, capital put to flight.
The empire disintegrated along the fines of its major administrative
and jurisdictional divisions. The thirteen mainland colonies of England
became one United States. Thirteen states replaced the empires of
Spain and Portugal. But, except in one area, the Rio de la Plata, the
early revolutionary movements, complicated and embittered by per-
sonal and regional rivalries as well as by divergencies of aims and
opinions, failed; and in the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata itself the
success obtained was precarious and the price of victory heavy.
The Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata, the newest of the four American
viceroyalties, embraced not only the present provinces of Argentina, but
the modern states of Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia as well. Here, the
events of 25 May 1810 at the viceregal capital, the deposition of the
1 The name by which the territory to the north of the Rio de la Plata and east of the
Uruguay, later the Republic of Uruguay, was commonly known.
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viceroy and the establishment of a junta, were the culmination of a
movement long preparing (pp. 614, 616, above). But the revolution had
been made at Buenos Aires. If it was a creole, it was also a porteno 1
revolution, and, as such, by no means everywhere acceptable. High up
the Paraguay river, for example, the creoles of Asuncion had no wish
to exchange the sovereignty of Spain for that of Buenos Aires. For the
portenos, indeed, they entertained an instinctive dislike, bom of isola-
tion, of old traditions, and of the exactions which Buenos Aires levied
on Paraguayan trade. In vain the portenos attempted to impose their
will by force of arms. Their troops, in 1811, were twice defeated, and
in the same year the Intendancy of Paraguay carried out its own
revolution, deposing its governor-intendant and establishing its
separate junta, of which one member, Dr Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de
Francia, a doctor both of the civil and of the sacred law, became in 1813
one of the country’s two consuls and in 1814 its dictator. He remained
its dictator till his death in 1840. Paraguay, under Francia’s rale a
state barely possible to enter and almost impossible to leave, had been
for ever lost to the Provinces of the Rio de la Plata.
As Paraguay repudiated the authority of Buenos Aires, so also, across
the Rio de la Plata, did the city’s rising commercial rival, Montevideo.
Resentful, like Asuncion, of the monopolistic tendencies which the
capital displayed, and garrisoned by Spanish troops, Montevideo
adhered to the cause of the regency in Spain. It remained an outpost of
Spanish power till 1814. But it stood alone. In 1811 the surrounding
population of the Banda Oriental rose under the leadership of a gaucho 2
guerrilla chieftain, Jose Gervasio Artigas, who first fought against the
royalists in Montevideo and then, late in 1813, turned against the
creoles of Buenos Aires also. Montevideo, attempting at the outset to
blockade Buenos Aires by sea or river and itself besieged by land, at
last, in 1814, surrendered to the portenos and was by them abandoned to
the orientates' 4 in the following year. But this triangular straggle in the
debatable land north of the Rio de la Plata, for which Spain and Portugal
had long contended, was an opportunity which the Portuguese crown
in the neighbouring Viceroyalty of Brazil found too good to be lost.
Its intervention, ostensibly on behalf of the royalists in Montevideo,
was at first held in check by the restraining hand of Lord Strangford,
the British ambassador at Rio de Janeiro and the peace-maker of the
Rio de la Plata, who sought to restrain porteno ambitions also. But by
1816 it could be held in check no longer. Portuguese invasion was
renewed, this time with at least the connivance of the portenos, so deep
1 Porteno, belonging to the puerto or port, the name customarily given to the inhabitants
of Buenos Aires.
* The ‘man on horseback’, or cowboy, of Argentina and Uruguay, originally a smuggler
in cattle hides.
* The inhabitants of the Banda Oriental.
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was their hatred of Artigas; Montevideo was captured, and, once
again, the frontiers of Brazil extended southwards to the waters of
the Rio de la Plata.
Paraguay had established its independence. The Banda Oriental had
fallen to Brazil. Upper Peru was re-annexed to the old, and loyal,
Viceroyalty of Peru, from which it had only been severed when the
Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata was created in 1776. A porteho army,
marching to the liberation of these mountain provinces, reached, in
18 1 1, the high waters of Lake Titicaca, only to be annihilated by royalist
troops from Peru; and though twice again, in 1813 and 1815, an
Argentine army stormed the heights, each time it struggled back
defeated. Upper Peru, like Paraguay and like the Banda Oriental,
had been for ever lost to the Provinces of the Rio de la Plata.
For the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata, therefore, the revolution
of May 1810 at Buenos Aires spelt dismemberment; and disruption on
the periphery was accompanied by anarchy at the centre. For many
years after 1810 any government at Buenos Aires was a belligerent
government, engaged in warfare on two fronts, in the Rio de la Plata
and on the frontiers of Upper Peru, and to some extent the fortunes of
administrations — juntas, triumvirates, congresses, directorates — fol-
lowed the fortunes of war, as well as the rise and fall of contending
groups. A constituent assembly, meeting in 1813, unified the central
government in the hands of a supreme director and took every step to
make Argentine independence plain to the world except that of explicitly
declaring it. But it failed to formulate a constitution, and it refused to
admit deputies who, representing those rural areas of the Banda
Oriental which were under the control of Artigas, brought with them
instructions to demand an immediate declaration of independence and
the establishment of a federal system of government in which each
province would retain its own autonomy.
So far the leadership in the revolution had belonged to Buenos Aires.
Now that leadership was challenged. As the ‘Protector of the Free
Peoples’, the champion of the rude democracy of the rural masses and
of provincial against porteno interests, Artigas soon dominated not
only the Banda Oriental but the adjoining provinces of Corrientes,
Entre Rios and Santa Fe as well; and while the territory of the old
viceroyalty seemed about to suffer yet further dismemberment, in
Buenos Aires itself the ‘national’ government was overthrown by
rebellion and mutiny. The United Provinces had become, by 1815, no
more than a league of semi-independent, imperfectly organised, and
even semi-hostile states. Temporarily, however, the tide of disunity was
arrested. At the instigation of the cabildo of Buenos Aires a new
Congress met in the interior city of Tucuman in March 1816, and
though the regions which Artigas controlled were not represented, all
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the other provinces sent delegates. It was this body which, restoring
national government, proclaimed on 9 July 1816 the independence of
the provinces of Argentina.
Time and again one or another Argentine leader had despaired of
the republic and had turned his thoughts to the erection of a con-
stitutional monarchy under a European prince. The Congress of
Tucuman even contemplated the re-establishment of the dynasty of the
Incas. But in the Rio de la Plata the revolution had survived. It had
done so nowhere else. In Chile, where, in 1810, the creole aristocracy
had instituted a junta at Santiago after the manner of Buenos Aires,
the movement for self-government had been brought to destruction by
the divisions within the ranks of the aristocracy itself, by regional
jealousies and personal rivalries, and finally by royalist invasion from
Peru, long to remain the stronghold of Spanish power: the battle of
Rancagua in October 1814 marked its end. In northern South America,
in the Captaincy-General of Venezuela, a republican regime had twice
been instituted and twice overthrown, and in the neighbouring Vice-
royalty of New Granada viceregal authority, subverted in 1810, had
been restored by an army of peninsular veterans six years later.
Nowhere did the early revolutionary movement have more disastrous
consequences than in these two most northerly regions of South
America. In Venezuela the junta established at Caracas in April 1810
had deported the chief colonial officials, sent agents abroad — among
them, on a mission to London, the young Simon Bolivar, the future
liberator of half a continent — and summoned a congress. The congress,
in July 18 1 1, proclaimed the independence of Venezuela and adopted,
in December, a constitution modelled on the federal constitution of the
United States. But creole leadership was inept, the country soon faced
an economic crisis, and the royalist reaction was swift; and when, on
Holy Thursday, 1812, an earthquake laid waste the patriot strongholds
but left the royalist centres untouched, the forces of reaction were
strengthened by the forces of nature. In the stress of emergency
Francisco de Miranda, who had long sought in Europe and America to
promote the independence of Spanish America, who had been a French
revolutionary general as well as much else in the course of his astonish-
ing career, and who had only recently returned to his native land, was
made dictator. But Miranda, losing heart, signed a capitulation with
the royalist leader. Attempting to fly the country, he was betrayed by
his own officers, Bolivar among them, and perished miserably in a
Spanish prison in 1816.
So ended the first Venezuelan republic. The second was as transitory
as the first. Bolivar, escaping by sea to New Granada, there found a
base from which to lead a liberating army back to Caracas, proclaiming
‘war to the death’ against the Spaniards as he marched. But his
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triumph was short-lived. The second republic fell before a horde of
half-naked llaneros, the plainsmen of the Orinoco valley, who followed
a barbaric Spaniard, Jose Tomas Boves. In July 1814 Caracas was again
abandoned, its population streaming from the city in terror, and
Bolivar, by the end of September, was once again a fugitive in New
Granada.
But the doom of New Granada itself was already sealed. Since 1810
the granadinos had found their chief occupation in the drafting of con-
stitutions. ‘It was widely assumed that federalism was the perfect
form of government; hence each province, and often just one section of
a province, had to be a sovereign state ; and each sovereign state, not to
mention each confederation of sovereign states, produced one or more
constitutions.’ 1 Amidst this doctrinaire enthusiasm New Granada
remained, till January 1815, disorganised, disunited, and in a state of
intermittent civil war. Meanwhile, in July 1814, Spain had resolved on
the reconquest of her colonies. An expeditionary force of 10,000 men
was collected together at Cadiz under the command of General Pablo
Morillo. It was originally intended for the Rio de la Plata. But since
the pacification of Venezuela and New Granada was considered to be
even more urgent, its destination was changed. It arrived off the coast
of Venezuela in April 1815, and Morillo soon moved on to New
Granada. Cartagena fell first, after a siege of more than a hundred
days, and after it the capital, Santa Fe de Bogota. By the middle of
1816 the Viceroyalty of New Granada had been reconstituted and the
revolution in northern South America appeared to be dead or dying.
Only in the more easterly parts of Venezuela was it still flickeringly alive.
This was the critical year of the revolutionary wars. In 1816 the
reaction was at its height, the cause was in the balance. But the revolu-
tion was now to be revived with redoubled force. In the south, in
Mendoza, at the foot of the great mountain wall which divides Argentina
from Chile, Jose de San Martin was quietly organising his Army of the
Andes. ‘Mendoza was the door to Chile; Chile was the door to
Peru.’ 2 And by one of the great coincidences in Spanish American
history, in December, when San Martin was getting ready to move,
Bolivar landed for the last time in Venezuela to renew his campaign
for the liberation of his native land ; and Bolivar, like San Martin, took
the long and distant view. ‘Yes, yes,’ he told his companions, ‘you
shall fly with me to rich Peru. Our destinies call us to the uttermost
parts of the American world.’ 3
1 David Bushnell, The Santander Regime in Gran Colombia (Newark, Delaware, 1954),
pp. 6-7.
* J. P. Otero, Historia del Libertador Don Jose de San Martin (4 vols., Buenos Aires, 1932),
vol. 1, p. 278.
* Sim6n Bolivar, Obras Completas (ed. Vicente Lecuna and Esther Barret de Nazaris,
2 vols.. La Habana, Cuba, 1947), vol. 1, pp. 223-4.
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San Martin had been born on a remote mission station high up on
the banks of the Uruguay river. Educated in Spain, he returned to
Buenos Aires in 1812, a professional soldier, a strategist and a tactician.
His famous design to carry the revolution to Peru by way of Chile,
instead of by the long road through Upper Peru, was formulated two
years later, and his organising genius was then directed to a single end,
the raising and equipping of an army to invade Chile by the high
Andean passes, one of them lying between the great peaks of Aconcagua
and Tupungato, at a height of 12,600 feet above the level of the sea.
By January 1817 all was ready. Each route had been carefully surveyed;
great pains had been taken to conceal San Martin’s real intentions and his
true line of march ; a time-table had been minutely laid down ; and despite
the terrible nature of the terrain, the fierce cold of the nights, mountain
sickness, and skirmishes with parties of the enemy, the whole operation,
conducted over a front of some five hundred miles, proceeded with
clockwork precision. Early in February each of San Martin’s com-
manders arrived exactly where he was intended to arrive and at exactly
the right time. The two main columns, joining forces, took the royalists
by surprise at Chacabuco on 12 February, and two days later San Martin
entered Santiago. He refused to accept the reins of government him-
self, and the cabildo of Santiago thereupon appointed as supreme
director of Chile a leader of the earlier insurgent movement, Bernardo
O’Higgins, who had crossed the Andes with San Martin and whose
father, an Irishman in the service of Spain, had been in turn both
captain-general of Chile and viceroy of Peru.
Chacabuco was one of the great battles of South America. But it
was not decisive. Nor was it till April 1818, when the royalists were
again defeated at Maipu, to the south of Santiago, that the seal was
set on the independence of Chile and the way prepared for the accom-
plishment of the second stage in San Martin’s great design — the sea-
borne invasion of Peru. Meanwhile, O’Higgins had begun the creation
of a navy. It was formed from English and American merchantmen
and privateers, ex-East Indiamen, a captured Spanish frigate, and some
other, smaller ships of war, and it was placed finally under the com-
mand of one of the most daring as well as one of the most incalculable
of British seamen, Thomas Cochrane, the future Earl of Dundonald,
who, engaged in a private war with the British Government, had been
persuaded to enter the service of Chile. Officered and manned by
Englishmen, Irishmen, Scotsmen, Americans and Chileans, it set sail
from Valparaiso Bay with San Martin’s army — San Martin had refused
to obey an order to return to Buenos Aires — in August 1820. The first
landings were made at Pisco, a thousand miles to the north, and from
here an expeditionary force was sent into the highlands, the fleet and
army then sailing to the north of Lima to blockade the capital and its
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port, Callao. Outnumbered by the royalist troops and pursuing a
policy of watching, waiting and negotiation — much to the disgust of
Cochrane, whose patience soon wore thin — San Martin was rewarded
in July 1821 by the peaceful evacuation of Lima. There, on the 28th,
the independence of Peru was solemnly proclaimed and, six days later,
San Martin assumed the title of Protector.
As in 1817 San Martin had crossed the Andes to the south, finally to
invade Peru — the fortress of Spain in South America — by sea, so in
1819, by an equally heroic march, Bolivar had crossed them to the
north, ultimately to invade Peru by land. Endowed with extraordinary
gifts, with talents that amounted to genius, Bolivar had been born at
Caracas in 1783. As a young man he had read avidly and widely,
Rousseau and Raynal, Voltaire and Montesquieu, Locke and Hobbes.
In Paris he had seen and worshipped Napoleon, ‘the bright star of
glory, the genius of liberty,’ 1 worshipped him, that is, until Napoleon
assumed a crown; and when not yet twenty-two he had stood on the
Monte Sacro outside Rome and there had sworn to free his country
from Spanish rule. His early career as a soldier (pp. 621-2, above) had
been compounded of brilliant successes and disastrous failures, ending
in exile in Jamaica (May 1815) and then in Haiti. But even in his darkest
hours Bolivar never lost faith in his star and his cause. ‘If nature
opposes our designs’, he declared when the earthquake of 1812 laid
Caracas in ruins, ‘we shall fight against her and make her obey’; 2
and the same faith burned in the famous letter which he wrote from
Jamaica in 1815 when all seemed to be lost: ‘The destiny of America
has been settled irrevocably. The bond that held it to Spain has been
sundered ... it is less difficult to unite the continents than to reconcile
the spirits of the two countries.’ 3
Disembarking at Barcelona on the Caribbean shores of Venezuela
on the last day of 1816, Bolivar, three months later, took the decisive
step of abandoning the coast for the interior, where the Orinoco gave
him direct communications with the outside world and where his
authority was gradually consolidated. Here, with his base at Angostura
(Ciudad Bolivar), he began to plan the foundations of a new state: he
thought of it as a ‘conservative republic’, embracing both Venezuela
and New Granada and reproducing in some respects at least what he
conceived to be the peculiar excellences of the British constitution. 4
Here also he was joined by large numbers of foreign legionaries, re-
1 Bolivar’s words as reported by his Irish aide-de-camp, Daniel O’Leary. Memorias
del General Daniel Florencio O’Leary. Narracidn (3 vols., Caracas, 1952), vol. 1, p. 61.
* Obras Completas, vol. n, p. 994.
’ ‘Contestation de un Americano Meridional a un Caballero de esta Isla,’ Kingston,
6 September, 1815. Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 160.
4 ‘Discurso pronunciado por el Libertador ante el Congreso de Angostura,’ 15 February,
1819. Ibid., vol. n, pp. 1132-55.
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cruited in England, Ireland and Scotland, many of them disbanded
soldiers of the Napoleonic wars. And from here, finally, late in May
1819, he set out with some three thousand men on his famous march
over the hot and flooded plains of the Orinoco, crossed the Andes by
the bleak Paramo of Pisba, 13,000 feet above sea-level, defeated the
main Spanish army at Boyaca (7 August), and, four days later, entered
the capital of New Granada, Santa Fe de Bogota, in triumph. A pro-
clamation of the union of New Granada and Venezuela in the Republic
of Colombia soon followed and a constitution for the new state, not
wholly, it is true, to Bolivar’s liking, was drafted at Cucuta in 1821,
Bolivar becoming the first president of the republic and Francisco de
Paula Santander its vice-president in charge of the civil administration
during Bolivar’s absences from the seat of government.
Even after Boyaca a European army, re-inforcing the Spanish com-
mander-in-chief, General Morillo, might still have turned the scales
against Bolivar. Certainly it could have prolonged the war; and such an
army was assembled at Cadiz in 1819. But once again events in Spain
profoundly influenced events in Spanish America. On 1 January 1820
Colonel Rafael Riego raised the standard of revolt against the despotism
of Ferdinand VII and proclaimed the restoration of the Constitution of
1812. The revolt rapidly spread; the king was forced to give way; and,
instead of troops, commissioners breathing peace and reconciliation
were dispatched to America. Instructed to enter into negotiations with
Bolivar, Morillo concluded an armistice (November 1820) and then
returned to Europe. But reconciliation, even with a constitutionalist
Spain, was now impossible, and the tide of victory was flowing fast.
The armistice having expired, Bolivar again crossed the Andes finally to
free Venezuela from Spanish control, except for the fortress of Puerto
Cabello, at the second battle of Carabobo (24 June 1821), where the
British legion played a notable part, and thereafter was able to turn
his attention from the eastern and central regions of what had been
the old Viceroyalty of New Granada to the western and southern, to
the strongly royalist province of Pasto and to the presidency of Quito.
Pasto was an integral part of New Granada. The presidency of Quito
was not. It was, however, a dependency of the viceroyalty, and for this
reason Bolivar regarded it as forming, quite naturally, a part of his
new Republic of Colombia. Save for the port and province of
Guayaquil, it had remained loyal to Spain. But Guayaquil, asserting
its independence in October 1820, had asserted also its right to join
whatever association might be formed in South America which should
best suit its interests, to join, that is, either Peru, where San Martin
had recently landed, or Colombia, whose independence Bolivar had
lately proclaimed. Each of the two great liberators hoped for the
incorporation of Guayaquil within the territory which he controlled;
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each sent agents to the city; and it was with the aid of troops from Peru
as well as from Colombia that Bolivar’s greatest lieutenant, the twenty-
nine-year-old Antonio Jose de Sucre, dispatched to Guayaquil by sea in
1821, won at Pichincha in May 1822 the decisive victory which put an
end to Spanish rule in Quito. Meanwhile Bolivar had begun his own
long and arduous march through Pasto to Quito, and whatever may
have been the views of San Martin, Bolivar, certainly, had no intention
of allowing to Guayaquil any substantial freedom of choice. Reaching
Quito itself in mid-June, he hurried from the capital to the port, and
from that moment self-determination, so far as the Guayaquilehos
were concerned, became an academic question. Guayaquil, like Quito,
was annexed to Colombia.
Under the shadow of this seizure, for it was little less, Bolivar and
San Martin met on 26 July 1822. They met as equals. But while
Bolivar’s star was still waxing, San Martin’s had already begun to wane.
Endowed with an immense vitality, enamoured of ‘glory’, eager for
fame, Bolivar had come to Guayaquil after a series of resounding
triumphs. He was the liberator of Venezuela and New Granada; he
had just consolidated his position in Quito; Guayaquil had fallen into
his hands. San Martin, on the other hand, was ill and weary. In Peru
he had reaped little but bitterness and misunderstanding. There had
been signs of disaffection within his own ranks. Cochrane had quarrelled
with him and abandoned him. Above all, Peru was still not free. He
had redeemed the coast, but not the highlands, and there the viceregal
forces remained intact. To destroy them, he needed Bolivar’s help,
and he failed to obtain it. The interviews between the two men were
held in private. No third person was present. But from the statements
of each it is plain that they could agree neither on the future form of
government in Peru — San Martin favoured a monarchy under a
European prince— nor on the conduct of the war in Peru and the means
of bringing it to an end. Such aid as Bolivar promised, San Martin
considered inadequate, and his own offer to serve under Bolivar,
Bolivar could not accept. 1
For San Martin this was the end. He returned to Lima a bitterly
disappointed man. The thought of abdication had been present in his
mind even before he left Peru. Now his resolve was taken. On
20 September he resigned his protectorate to a constitutent congress
newly assembled and the next day sailed to Chile. ‘My promises to
the countries for which I have fought are fulfilled’, he declared — ‘to
secure their independence and to leave them to select their own govern-
ments. The presence of a fortunate soldier, however disinterested he
1 The evidence for this offer is disputed. See the discussion in Gerhard Masur, ‘The
Conference of Guayaquil’, Hispanic American Historical Review, xxxi (1951), pp. 189-
229.
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may be, is dangerous to newly constituted states.’ 1 From Chile he
moved to Argentina and then to Europe, and there he died, more than a
quarter of a century later.
It remained for Bolivar to complete the emancipation of Peru. But
it was impossible that he should leave Colombia at once — his pre-
occupations were too many — nor would he have been immediately
welcomed in Peru; and when, in response to tardy but increasingly
urgent solicitations, he did at last reach Lima, in September 1823,
it was to find the country in chaos, one president in the northerly town
of Trujillo, another in the capital, and an undefeated viceroy in the
highlands. In February 1824, moreover, the garrison at Callao revolted
and went over to the royalists, and while a despairing Congress invested
Bolivar with dictatorial powers, a viceregal army, sweeping down from
the mountains, re-occupied Lima. But the final stages of the war were
now approaching. Rallying and recruiting his forces — he was always
magnificent in adversity — Bolivar met, and defeated, his opponents at
Junin in the high Andes on 6 August — so cold was the night that
‘nearly all the wounded on both sides perished’; 2 and this was the
beginning of the end. It came at Ayacucho — Sucre’s victory — on
9 December, when the last Spanish viceroy laid down his arms. A few
royalist strongholds — the fortress of Callao, the island of Chiloe off
the coast of Chile — held out till 1826. But what Yorktown had been to
the British Empire in North America, Ayacucho was to the Spanish
Empire in South America. All Peru to the Desaguadero river, the
boundary between Peru and Upper Peru, or the Presidency of Charcas,
was now in patriot hands. It only remained to eliminate royalist resist-
ance in Upper Peru itself, the first part of the empire to rise (p. 615,
above), the last to be freed, and this was soon accomplished. As
Sucre advanced the country rose to greet him . He summoned an
assembly, and the assembly pronounced in favour of independence.
So, in August 1825, the republic of Bolivia was born. In compliment
to Bolivar it took his name, offered him the executive power whenever
he should visit the country, as he soon did, and invited him to draw up
a constitution.
Liberator of Colombia, dictator of Peru, president of Bolivia,
Bolivar, at the end of 1825, had reached the height of his power and
fame. He was dreaming now of a Spanish American League of Nations,
its seat at Panama, and he dreamed also of a still closer federation
between the states which he had helped to found. But the waters of
anarchy were rising. For Bolivia he drafted a constitution which the
1 Documentos del Archivo de San Martin (12 vols., Buenos Aires, 1910-11), vol. x,
P- 356.
* John Miller, Memoirs of General [ William] Miller in the service of the Republic of
Peru (2 vols., London, 1828), vol. n, p. 134.
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WAR AND PEACE IN AN AGE OF UPHEAVAL
other states, he hoped, would adopt. He looked upon it as the ark
which would save all from drowning, 1 and it was in fact a monarchy in
disguise — a republic with a life-president who would nominate his
successor, a legislature far removed from popular control, and a
Chamber of Censors, appointed for life, to watch over the constitution
and the laws. ‘I am convinced to the very marrow of my bones,’ he
wrote in this same year, ‘that our America can only be ruled through an
able despotism.’ 2
The end was tragedy. All his plans, all his hopes, collapsed. The
Congress of Panama, meeting in June 1826, but attended by delegates
from Peru, Colombia, Mexico and Central America only (p. 635, below),
was a failure, except in so far as it afforded an inspiration for a distant
future. The Andean Confederation remained a dream. Bolivia turned
against Sucre, whom Bolivar had left behind as president. Peru,
adopting Bolivar’s constitution while he was present but repudiating it
so soon as he was absent, invaded both Bolivia and Colombia, and
Colombia was divided against itself. The liberator became a dictator.
His life was attempted, and amidst a falling world he despaired. ‘There
is no good faith in America, nor among the nations of America,’ he
wrote in 1829. ‘Treaties are papers; constitutions, books; elections,
battles; freedom [is] anarchy; and life, a torment.’ 3 At the last he trod
the road of exile, and on that road, in December 1830, he died. It was
the death both of a man and of a system. Venezuela, under the leader-
ship of its great guerrilla soldier, Jose Antonio Paez, had already
seceded from Colombia, and so also, under the new name of Ecuador,
had the old Presidency of Quito.
So vast a state as Great Colombia, so thinly peopled, so regionally
divided, never, perhaps, had much chance of survival. But throughout
Spanish America, in Mexico as well as in Colombia, and in Argentina as
in Peru, the problem of organising viable and stable states on the ruins
of an imperial administrative system which had carefully excluded
Americans native-born from the technical tasks of government proved
to be formidable in the extreme. Chile, it is true, found an acceptable
solution of the problem in the 1830’s. There, O’Higgins (p. 623, above)
had fallen in 1823, a victim to the resentments of the Chilean landed
gentry, inimical quite as much to his social policies as to his personal
rule; and his exile was followed by seven years of political experiment
and debate — there were three constitutions between 1823 and 1829 —
and of increasing confusion and disorder. But the victory of the con-
servative forces in the civil war of 1830 put an end to this turbulence,
1 Bolivar to Gutierrez de la Fuente, 12 May 1826. Obras Completas, vol. 1, p. 1326.
* Bolivar to Santander, 8 July 1826. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 1390.
! ‘Una Mirada sobre la America EspaSola,’ attributed to Bolivar. Obras Completas,
vol. n, p. 1304.
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and Chile, under its aristocratic constitution of 1833, became an oasis
of peace in a continent of disorder.
Argentina was less fortunate. The Congress of Tucuman (p. 620,
above) had proclaimed the independence of the ‘United Provinces of
South America’ in 1816. It had re-established a Supreme Directorate,
and, moving to Buenos Aires, it had promulgated, in 1819, a con-
stitution. This provided for a highly centralised, unitary state. It
ignored provincial ideas of local autonomy and provincial fears of the
economic hegemony of a single city, a single port, and a single province.
It ignored also the fact that many of the provinces had fallen into the
hands of military chieftains, the caudillos of the plains, and that men
such as Estanislao Lopez of Santa Fe and Francisco Ramirez of Entre
Rios (who was soon to drive his old ally, and indeed master, Jose
Artigas, 1 into exile in Paraguay) were unlikely to submit tamely to
orders from Buenos Aires. Finally, some at least of its authors were
soon discovered to have been engaged in plans to convert the republic
into a monarchy. The result was the ‘anarchy of 1820’. Lopez and
Ramirez led their cowboy cavalry against the capital; congress and
directorate vanished; national government disappeared, and only the
shadow of a federation remained.
Amidst this national disintegration, Buenos Aires, after the first
shock of confusion, quickly recovered its stability. In September 1820
a Junta of Representatives called Martin Rodriguez to the governor-
ship of the province (1820-4). Rodriguez appointed as his Secretary of
Government and Foreign Affairs a forty-one-year-old porteno states-
man, Bernardino Rivadavia, recently returned from Europe, and within
three years Rivadavia, in the opinion of the first British consul-general to
Argentina, had done more for the amelioration of Buenos Aires than all
his predecessors put together. 2 A representative assembly was estab-
lished, a bank and a university were founded, the frontiers of the
province were extended, its finances were re-organised, the police and
judiciary reformed. ‘Never before, and only rarely afterwards, was
Buenos Aires the scene of such varied and far-reaching legislative and
administrative activity.’ 3 Finally, in December 1824 a constituent con-
gress again met. This body, in January 1825, enacted a ‘fundamental
law’ which provided that the provinces should govern themselves until
a national constitution should be approved but placed the conduct of
foreign affairs in the hands of the Government of Buenos Aires, and
this law made possible the signing, in February, of a commercial treaty
between Britain and the United Provinces. Finally, a year later, in
1 See above, pp. 619, 620. Artigas fled to Paraguay in 1820 and died there in 1850, the
same year in which San Martin died at Boulogne-sur-Mer.
s Woodbine Parish to Canning, 27 April 1824. P.R.O. F.O. 6/3.
s Miron Burgin, The Economic Aspects of Argentine Federalism, 1820-52 (Cambridge,
Mass., 1946), p. 87.
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February 1826, the Congress appointed Rivadavia, who had again been
absent on a mission to Europe, as president of the Republic and in
December, at long last, it promulgated a constitution. But experience
had taught little to the constitution-makers at Buenos Aires. Like the
Constitution of 1819, the Constitution of 1826 would have created a
highly centralised, unitary state, and, thus flouting federalist feeling in
the country at large, it had no chance of survival. Province after pro-
vince rejected it. The president resigned. The Congress dissolved itself.
And on the ruins of the Rivadavian system was now to arise, not the
federal organisation of the state, but the absolute rule of the greatest
of the Argentine caudillos — Juan Manuel de Rosas.
The country, meanwhile, had gone to war with Brazil, which had
invaded the Banda Oriental — the future Uruguay — in 1816 (pp. 619-20,
above) and had erected it into the Estado Cisplatino in 1821. But
neither the Banda nor Buenos Aires could reconcile itself to Portuguese,
or Brazilian, dominion in the Rio de la Plata, and in April 1825 Juan
Antonio de Lavalleja, an * Oriental ’ exile, launched the liberating expedi-
tion of the ‘immortal thirty-three’ across the Rio de la Plata. The rural
population of the Banda rose. An assembly meeting in the little town of
La Florida pronounced in favour of union with ‘the other Argentine
provinces’. The Government of Buenos Aires accepted this incorpora-
tion, and war with Brazil followed. It lasted three years, with no very
decisive results by land or sea but considerable damage to British trade;
and it was finally ended through British mediation. As early as February
1826 Canning had suggested that ‘ the town and territory of Montevideo ’
might ‘become and remain independent’; 1 and when, in August 1828,
after prolonged pressure from Lord Ponsonby, the British Minister
first at Buenos Aires and then at Rio de Janeiro, a peace treaty was at last
signed between the rival powers it recognised, and guaranteed, the
existence of the independent republic of Uruguay as a buffer state
between them.
The war over the Banda Oriental contributed to the downfall of
Rivadavia in Argentina. It seriously impaired also the prestige of the
young Dom Pedro I of Brazil. Brazil, a colony in 1807, a kingdom in
1815 (p. 612, above), had become an independent empire in 1822;
and for this last transformation events in Portugal had been directly
responsible. For Portugal, like Spain, had experienced a revolution in
1820. A Cortes had been summoned, meeting in January 1821, the
basis of a constitution was prepared, and King John VI, as he had
become in 1816, was placed in a painful dilemma. Happy in the country
to which he had fled, thirteen years earlier, to escape the clutches of
Napoleon, he had long resisted Portuguese, and British, pressure that he
should return to Lisbon. But even he could not but realise that the
1 Canning to Ponsonby, 28 Feb. 1826. Webster, op. cit. (on p. 617 above), vol. 1, p. 138.
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future of the House of Braganza was now at stake. He hesitated to stay,
and perhaps to lose the Portuguese crown; he feared to go, and per-
haps to lose the Brazilian. Finally, after extreme vacillation and
tumultuous scenes in Rio de Janeiro, he set sail on 26 April 1821, taking
with him some 3,000 Portuguese and almost the entire contents of the
Bank of Brazil, and leaving behind him his twenty-four-year-old son
and heir, Dom Pedro, as regent.
So far, Brazilians had embraced the constitutionalist cause with
enthusiasm. They were now to be disillusioned. For the Cortes at
Lisbon found no difficulty in reconciling liberalism at home with
despotism abroad. Its intention to reduce Brazil to its former colonial
status was all too evident. The authority of Rio de Janeiro was to be
overthrown, the provinces were to be made dependent on Lisbon, and
Dom Pedro was ordered home. The young, impetuous, ardent prince,
with his dissolute habits and easy manners, now became the symbol of
the unity of Brazil and the hope of its native aristocracy. On 9 January
1822, in response to petitions and appeals from Rio de Janeiro, Sao
Paulo, and Minas Gerais, he gave his promise to remain. As his chief
adviser he chose Jose Bonifacio de Andrada e Silva, a native of Sao
Paulo, a former professor of the University of Coimbra, a mineralogist
of note, and the presiding genius of Brazilian independence. In May
he accepted from the Municipality of Rio de Janeiro the title of
‘Perpetual Protector and Defender of Brazil’. He summoned in June a
constituent assembly and, in August, undertook a visit to Sao Paulo.
There, on 7 September, on the banks of the little stream of Ipiranga, he
received dispatches from Portugal annulling all his acts. Declaring
‘The hour has come! Independence or death!’, he hurried back to
Rio de Janeiro. On 12 October he was proclaimed Constitutional
Emperor of Brazil and on 1 December was crowned. It remained to
expel the Portuguese troops from the northern provinces of Bahia,
Maranhao and Para, as they had already been expelled from Rio de
Janeiro; and with the aid of Lord Cochrane, who had exchanged the
naval service of the republic of Chile for that of the Empire of Brazil,
this was done. In the southern ‘Estado Cisplatino’ Portuguese soldiers
in Montevideo long defied Brazilian. But by the end of 1823 the inde-
pendence of Brazil was complete. Civil war had been avoided, separatist
tendencies resisted, administrative continuity preserved.
But Dom Pedro had already forcibly dissolved the constituent
assembly, less than seven months after it had met, angered by its high
views of its powers and its marked hostility to the Portuguese elements
in the country. He had broken with Jose Bonifacio, who, however
arrogant his conduct as the Crown’s chief minister, had been the real
founder of the empire; and Jose Bonifacio and his two brothers,
assuming the leadership of the anti-Portuguese party both within the
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assembly and outside it, had been exiled to France. Liberal by intention
but despotic by nature, he had ordered, finally, a new or revised con-
stitution to be substituted for that which the assembly had been engaged
in drafting; and in March 1824, by imperial decree, this was promul-
gated. It turned Brazil into a highly centralised, unitaiy monarchy,
which was to survive for sixty-five years; and, though it placed immense
powers in the hands of the crown, in form, and perhaps in character, it
was liberal enough. But the assembly had been dissolved. The con-
stitution had been granted by the emperor to the nation, not given by
the assembly to the crown; and Brazilians felt a grave mistrust. So
great was the dissatisfaction in 1824 that Pernambuco, a centre of
strong regional loyalties and the scene of a republican revolt in 1817,
denounced the emperor, repudiated the constitution, and attempted to
establish a new state, the ‘Confederation of the Equator’; and to crush
this movement Dom Pedro had, once again, to seek the aid of Lord
Cochrane and to suspend also the civil rights’ clauses of his constitution.
Revolt in Pernambuco in 1 824 was followed by revolt in the Estado
Cisplatino in 1825, resulting in a long, expensive and unpopular war
with Argentina and a peace, still more unpopular, in 1828, by which
the empire’s most southerly province became the independent state
of Uruguay (p. 630, above). Meanwhile, Dom Pedro had signed
treaties both with Portugal and with Britain, herself greatly interested
in the reconciliation of Dom Pedro and King John. Portugal was
Britain’s oldest ally. Imperial Brazil, in Canning’s eyes, was a link
between republican America and monarchical Europe, and in no part
of South America were British commercial interests so extensive. But
it was only after negotiations of extreme complexity, which needed all
the skill and energy that Canning could command, that Portugal, in
August 1825, was at last brought to sign a treaty of recognition with her
former colony, King John assuming, pro forma, the title of Emperor of
Brazil, and then renouncing it in favour of his son. But the treaty
left open, as Brazilians duly noted, the question of the succession to the
Portuguese throne, and, still worse, by an additional article, at first kept
secret, Dom Pedro agreed to compensate his father for losses in Brazil
and to assume responsibility for a debt contracted by Portugal in
England. Two treaties with England followed. The one, a commercial
treaty, signed in 1827, in effect duplicated in Brazil those special
privileges which Britain had long enjoyed in her trade with Portugal.
The other, a convention (November 1826) for the abolition of the slave
trade by 1830, Dom Pedro was equally unable to resist. Both treaties
were disliked. But the second, seeming to threaten the very foundations
of Brazilian prosperity, based on slave labour and the plantation
system, gave bitter offence and proved impossible to enforce. The fact
that the number of slaves imported rapidly increased told its own tale.
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The estrangement between the Emperor of Brazil and the Brazilians
who had crowned him was now almost complete. On the death of his
father in 1826, Dom Pedro had assumed and then renounced the
Portuguese crown. But he had continued, as Brazilians thought, to be
unduly concerned with Portuguese affairs. His autocratic tendencies
had grown more pronounced, his private life more scandalous, and his
reliance on his Portuguese friends and supporters more marked. His
relations with his parliament — it had not been summoned till 1826 —
had become intolerably strained, and, to crown all, the national
finances were in chaos. The end came in 1831, when the country had
reached the verge of revolution and the emperor could no longer rely
on his own troops. On 7 April he abdicated in favour of his infant
son and embarked on board a British warship to sail for Europe.
Brazil henceforth was in the hands of Brazilians.
Two other countries experimented with monarchy. These were Haiti,
occupying the western third of the island of Hispaniola, and Mexico.
In Haiti, the old French colony of Saint Domingue, which had become
the first negro republic in the modern world in January 1804, Jean-
Jacques Dessalines, a brutal savage from the Congo, was proclaimed
emperor as Jacques I in the following October, to be murdered two
years later, having himself contrived the murder of almost the entire
white population that had survived the terrible events enacted in the
French part of the island during the last decade of the eighteenth
century. His empire fell, in the north, to a more remarkable leader,
Henri Christophe, also an ex-slave, who was crowned as Henri I in 1811,
and ruled his little kingdom with vigour, brutality and success, and, in
the south, to an educated mulatto, Alexandre Petion, who governed,
more mildly but less competently, as president for life, and was suc-
ceeded by another mulatto, Jean-Pierre Boyer (1818-43). On
Christophe’s suicide in 1820 his kingdom was absorbed by Boyer, who
then united the whole island under a single government by annexing the
Spanish colony of Santo Domingo. This unhappy country, nominally
ceded to France in 1795, temporarily occupied by Haitian troops in
1801, and then held for France by a small force under General Ferrand,
had been restored to Spain as a result of an uprising in 1808-9 supported
by British ships and Spanish troops. In November 1821 it again rose
and sought, as an independent state, union with Colombia, only to fall,
early in 1822, under the rule of Haiti and to remain under Haitian control
for the next twenty-two years.
Santo Domingo had been lost as much by conquest as by insur-
rection. Spain’s other insular possessions, Cuba and Puerto Rico,
remained loyal to the mother country. They were relatively strongly
governed and relatively prosperous. Cuba, moreover, was both a base
from which operations against the mainland colonies could be con-
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ducted and a refuge for loyalists, and, despite some stirrings of dis-
content, neither its Spanish nor its creole population wished to risk the
horrors of a slave insurrection such as had occurred in Haiti. On the
North American mainland, however, the great Viceroyalty of New
Spain, which had been the wealthiest of Spain’s dominions at the end
of the eighteenth century, and the neighbouring Captaincy-General of
Guatemala, both proclaimed their independence in the 1820’s, though
in them revolution took a different course from that which it had
followed in South America.
In New Spain, as in other parts of the empire, the events of 1808 in
the peninsula had precipitated a struggle for power between Spaniards
bom in America and Spaniards bom in Spain, a struggle fought out, for
the most part, in Mexico City itself (p. 614, above). Here, however, the
European Spaniards had retained control, though not without the illegal
deposition of a viceroy, and creole ambitions were frustrated. Revolu-
tion in New Spain, indeed, began not in the capital but in the provinces,
and less as a political than as a social movement, a revolt of the dis-
possessed against the possessing classes. It began on 16 September 1810,
when Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the parish priest of Dolores in
the Intendancy of Guanajuato, summoned his Indian congregation to
arms. A member of a conspiratorial group in the neighbouring town of
Queretaro, Hidalgo had been plotting a creole rebellion to take place in
December when the discovery of his plans drove him to precipitate an
immediate Indian rising instead. It was unpremeditated and un-
organised. But, as the Audiencia of Mexico complained, it spread with
the rapidity of a pestilence. 1 With a few creole officers, ex-conspirators
of Queretaro, and a few trained troops, Hidalgo was soon at the head of
a mob of 50,000 Indians and mestizos who attacked and sacked, with
great barbarity, the provincial capital, Guanajuato, and then, their
numbers still swelling, moved on to threaten Mexico City. But here the
‘Captain-General of America’, as he now called himself, halted; his
ragged army turned back, and in January 1811, on the banks of the
Lerma river at no great distance from Guadalajara, it was put to flight.
Captured some six weeks later, Hidalgo was first condemned by the
ecclesiastical courts, and then, abjuring the insurrection and repenting
of his own part in it, in July was shot.
But the flame which he had lighted was not so easily quenched.
Collapsing in the north, the insurrection revived in the south, where
the mantle of Hidalgo was inherited by another priest, and a greater man,
Jose Maria Morelos, who made himself the master of much of southern
Mexico for nearly four years, summoned a congress and promulgated a
constitution, before he also was captured and shot in 1815. Thereafter
the congress did not long survive; the armed bands roaming the
1 H. G. Ward, Mexico in 1827 (2 vols., London, 1828), vol. 1, p. 497.
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countryside were gradually reduced; and by the time of the liberal
revolution of 1820 in Spain only a few irreconcilables remained, notably
Vicente Guerrero and his followers in the south-east, and Guadalupe
Victoria (Felix Fernandez), wandering hopeless and alone in the
mountains and forests of Vera Cruz, but destined to become the first
president of Mexico.
With the victory, though transient indeed, of liberalism in Spain in
1820, the scene in Mexico was changed. Indians and mestizos, with some
creole leadership and support, had begun the revolution. Creoles and
peninsulares, resolved to preserve New Spain from the dangerous innova-
tions of old Spain, completed it. They found an instrument for their
purpose in a young creole officer, Agustin de Iturbide. Sent by the
viceroy to crush Guerrero, Iturbide made overtures to him instead,
proclaiming in the so-called Plan of Iguala (February 1821), which
offered some concession to almost every faction in the war-weary
country, the independence of Mexico, the equality of Mexicans and
Europeans, and the supremacy of the Roman Catholic faith. The plan
provided also for the establishment of a monarchy, preferably under a
prince of the Spanish royal house. Guerrero and the army accepted it.
The viceregal authorities were compelled to acquiesce, and in September
Iturbide entered Mexico City — to establish a regency and summon a
congress and, in May 1822, to secure his own elevation to the throne of
Mexico by the acclamation of his troops. In July, as the Emperor
Agustin I, he was crowned. But though Iturbide could seize a throne,
he was unable to hold it. His own ambition and incompetence, his
inability to pay his troops, the jealousies of others, all precipitated
his fall. In December the commandant of the port of Vera Cruz,
Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, ‘pronounced’ against him, and in
February 1823 he was forced to abdicate. A republic was proclaimed
and in August 1824 Guadalupe Victoria was inaugurated as its first
president.
These events in Mexico inevitably affected the neighbouring
Captaincy-General or Kingdom of Guatemala, which, despite occa-
sional disorders between 1811 and 1814, had so far remained loyal
to Spain. In September 1821 the province of Chiapas decided to throw
in its lot with Mexico, and in the same month a junta of the principal
officials meeting in Guatemala City pronounced in favour of inde-
pendence. But Iturbide had other views. In June 1822 a Mexican army
entered the capital and for a brief period Iturbide was able to extend his
rule over the whole of the ancient kingdom. On his fall, however, a
‘national constitutent assembly’, in July 1823, declared that the
provinces of which the kingdom was composed were free and inde-
pendent both of old Spain and of New Spain and that together they
formed the United Provinces of Central America — a federation which
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survived only till 1838, then dissolving into its component parts of
Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Costa Rica.
No outside Power came to the formal assistance of the mainland
colonies of Spain in their long struggle for independence, as France
and Spain had come to the aid of the mainland colonies of England.
But foreign soldiers and sailors, more particularly the British and Irish
soldiers who fought under Bolivar and the British and Irish seamen who
sailed with Cochrane, gave invaluable help to the insurgents; and the
services of British merchants and bankers were equally important.
They were not, of course, disinterested services. But they provided what
the insurrectionary governments needed — money, credit and supplies.
In England capital looked abroad. In Spanish America British brokers
and commercial agents, who had eagerly awaited the opening of the
Spanish American markets with or without the permission of Spain,
established themselves in one liberated area after another, their interests
in part protected by the ships of the Royal Navy, whose captains trans-
ported also immense quantities of specie to England. And while the
continent was flooded with British goods and the orgy of speculation in
Spanish American mines in 1824-5 recalled the days of the South Sea
bubble, revolutionary government after revolutionary government
successfully raised loans in London. The bubble burst at the end of
1825 and the collapse of the mining schemes heralded default on the
loans. But by this time more than twenty million pounds sterling of
British capital had been invested one way or another in Latin America,
more than three times the amount that had yet found its way to the
United States.
No British statesman could ignore the interests of British trade.
None would forego the trade of Spanish America. But so long as the
Napoleonic wars continued, the British government, far from desiring
the disintegration of the Spanish Empire, would have preferred its
entire strength and resources to be concentrated against the common
enemy (p. 613, above). Castlereagh was willing, even eager, to promote
the reconciliation of Spain and her colonies. But he saw, perfectly
clearly, that unless the mother country was prepared ‘to place the
inhabitants of America upon a commercial footing of corresponding
advantage with the inhabitants of European Spain’, and unless she
realised that ‘provinces of such magnitude’ would no longer ‘submit
to be treated as mere colonies’, their ‘separation from the parent state’
was ‘inevitable and at hand’. 1 On these conditions, and no other, he
was ready to mediate. But he not only refused to support Spain by
force of arms, he made sure, in 1817, that the European Powers should
1 Castlereagh to Sir Henry Wellesley, 1 April 1812. Webster, op. cit., vol. n, p. 311.
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not feel free to do so either; 1 and, by 1820 he was himself convinced that
the recognition of the independence of large parts of Spanish America
was merely a matter of time and method. It was not, however, till 1822
that Britain recognised the flags of South American vessels, an act
which constituted recognition de facto ; not till late in 1823 that she
appointed consuls and commissioners of enquiry to the new Spanish
American states; and not till 1825 that, by the negotiation of com-
mercial treaties, she accorded recognition de jure to Mexico, Colombia
and the United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata.
The United States had taken earlier action, sending out com-
missioners to South America in 1817, signing a treaty with Spain for the
cession of the Floridas in 1819, and recognising Colombia and Mexico
in 1822 and Buenos Aires and Chile in 1823. John Quincy Adams, the
greatest of American secretaries of state, would have been prepared,
though reluctantly, to go hand in hand with England in a common
policy of recognition before the Florida treaty had been signed, but
Castlereagh at this time had other views; and when in 1823, after a
French army had restored despotism in Spain, Canning sought the
co-operation of the United States in a joint declaration of policy, a
warning to Europe and France, it was Adams’s turn to hold back.
Adams believed, as he told the British minister, that the idea of any
‘active and substantial interposition’ by Europe in Spanish America
was ‘too absurd to be entertained’. 2 He believed also, as he told the
cabinet, that it was ‘ more candid as well as more dignified ’ for the United
States to avow its principles ‘explicitly’ than to ‘come in as a cock-boat
in the wake of the British man-of-war’. 3
In 1823, therefore, the United States acted alone. President Monroe’s
famous message to Congress on 2 December 4 was partly a gesture of
sympathy with the young republics to the south; it was designed partly
in the interests of the security of the United States, and partly also to
enhance the political prestige of the United States in the western
hemisphere, at the expense both of Europe and of England. There
could have been no clearer demonstration of the clash of interests,
within the framework of a common purpose, between the two Anglo-
Saxon powers. Britain and the United States were each opposed to
European intervention in Spanish America, though the danger of such
intervention was always remote. Each was throughout determined to
uphold the right to trade freely with the Spanish American area, and,
except for the duplication, or near-duplication, in Brazil of the special
privileges which Britain had enjoyed in Portugal, neither of them sought
1 See his circular memorandum of 20 August 1817. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 14; vol. n, pp. 352-8.
* Bradford Perkins, ed., ‘The Suppressed Dispatch of H. U. Addington, Washington,
3 November, 1823’, Hispanic American Historical Review, xxxvn (1957), p. 485.
* Dexter Perkins, The Monroe Doctrine, 1823-26 (Cambridge, Mass., 1927), p. 74.
4 See Chapter xxn, p. 591, and Chapter xxv, p. 682.
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exclusive commercial advantages for itself. But the rivalry between them
was only thinly veiled. Castlereagh would have been glad to see Bourbon
princes at the head of the new Spanish American states. Canning
regarded the preservation of the principle of monarchy in Brazil as a
cardinal point in his grand design to link Latin America to Europe
(p. 632, above). But to these ideas the United States was ineradicably
opposed. She wished to see an American system and an American
policy predominate. Each country, moreover, feared the territorial
ambitions of the other. On the Spanish borderlands the expansion of the
United States did indeed contribute to the collapse of Spanish rule, and
Canning and Adams each suspected, though with little justification, the
other’s designs on Cuba. Finally, to political rivalry there was added
also commercial hostility.
But the Monroe Doctrine was important not for what it did but for
what it became, and Canning, for his part, was quick to undermine any
temporary advantage that the United States had gained. The memoran-
dum of his conversations in October 1823 with Prince Jules de Polignac,
the French Ambassador in London — conversations in which Polignac
abjured, on behalf of France, any design of interfering by force of arms
in Spanish America — was widely used to show ‘how early and how
anxiously’ Britain had ‘declared against any project of bringing back
the late Spanish colonies under the dominion of the mother country by
foreign aid’; 1 and to this riposte were added the commercial treaties of
1825 — treaties, which, given the great disparity in power between Britain
and the United States, inevitably meant more to the infant Spanish
American republics than did recognition by the United States. In Europe
also their effect was decisive. The three Eastern Powers indeed pro-
tested, but principally as a matter of form, and France as well as
Britain now tried to induce Spain to come to terms with the new
states. France herself recognised them in 1830. The Papacy did so in
1835. It was not, however, till 1836 that Spain began the process of
recognising her former colonies and not till 1895 that she completed it.
1 Planta to Woodbine Parish, 30 December 1823. P.R.O. F.O. 118/1.
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CHAPTER XXIV
THE FINAL COALITION AND THE CONGRESS
OF VIENNA, 1813-15
as Napoleon’s fortunes declined, those of his enemies rose; and a
ZA coalition, destined to be finally victorious, began to emerge in the
1 Achaotic winter of 1812-13. While remnants of the Grande Armee
stumbled westward out of Russia, Tsar Alexander I decided to pursue
Napoleon beyond Russian soil and out across Europe, seeking allies as
Russian arms advanced. Prussia became the first by the Treaty of
Kalisch of February 1813, which provided for obvious war needs, and
promised to restore Prussia to her former proportions. Austria was
slower in responding to Russian advances, but Great Britain signed
treaties of alliance and subsidy with both Prussia and Russia at Reichen-
bach in June. Following a fruitless armistice and a singularly barren
‘peace ’ conference at Prague they resumed the struggle against Napoleon
in August, this time in the Germanies and with Austria finally in the
coalition. After several secondary engagements, the battle of Leipzig,
16-18 October 1813, demonstrated the impressive power of the coali-
tion by smashing Napoleon’s position in Central Europe. His last
German allies deserted him, and his army of nearly 200,000 was utterly
routed, two-thirds of it killed, wounded, sick or captured. Before the
end of the year the French had been co nfi ned to territory west of the
Rhine for the first time since their eruption in 1805.
The autumn of 1813, so successful in allied military affairs, was a
singularly frustrating period for Britain’s foreign secretary, Lord
Castlereagh. Although his country had been constantly and actively in
opposition to Napoleon for years, although she had driven the enemy
from Spain, rendered his fleet useless and financed the coalition, scant
attention was paid to her counsels by remote allies preoccupied with
Napoleon in Central Europe. In addition, Castlereagh felt particularly
thwarted when Aberdeen, ambassador to Vienna, joined Metternich in
the ‘Frankfurt Proposals’ of November 1813, an attempt to negotiate
an end to the war by offering Napoleon frontiers at the Alps, Pyrenees
and Rhine. This last proposal clearly violated one of the canons of
English foreign policy, and was something no British foreign secretary
of sound mind could condone. Finding it clumsy to deal with in-
attentive allies through inadequate ambassadors, Castlereagh decided
to go himself to the Continent.
His Instructions, 1 drawn by his own hand and approved by the
1 C. K. Webster, British Diplomacy, 1813-15 (1921), pp. 123-6; this book will henceforth
be referred to as B.D.
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Cabinet, form one of the major documents of the period of peace-
making and furnish us with splendid insight into the structure of his
plans. His primary aim, which was to prevent France from establishing
a naval position on the Scheldt, ‘especially at Antwerp’, he proposed to
achieve by uniting most of the Low Countries under Holland. To secure
this vital point he was prepared to bargain over some of the islands
England had seized during the war. He wanted also a consolidating
alliance which would give sounder shape to the miscellaneous opera-
tions and agreements of the coalition. This alliance was ‘not to termin-
ate with the war’, but to remain as a deterrent to ‘an attack by France
on the European dominions of any one of the contracting parties.’
In the territorial settlement he wanted Prussia brought more to the
west, and hoped for a re-establishment of Holland, Spain, Portugal, and
Italy ‘in security and independence’, a restored Papacy and a strength-
ened Sardinia. His separate ‘Memorandum on the Maritime Peace’
of the same period called for the return of France to her old frontiers.
It also called for the creation of a naval as well as a military balance of
power, but here he spoke more in lip service to the equilibrist ideal;
however much a balance helped her in military matters, it obviously
threatened Britain’s clear leadership in naval affairs. In all of these
points it is evident that he drew heavily on the earlier, brilliant analysis
of Pitt, whose disciple he had been and whose legacy was summarised
in the ‘Draft to Vorontzov’ of 19 January 1805. Pitt had discussed this
remarkable statement of policy with Castlereagh, and it is possible that
the latter had even helped in its formulation.
As he now left a fog-bound London for a frost-bound continent,
Castlereagh was a man of forty-five, a leader of courage and character
rather than intellect, a person firmly in command of himself, steadfast,
simple, and coldly aloof, combining an uncertain hold on the French
language with a secure grasp of foreign policy. Early 1814 found him at
headquarters, which had moved forward into eastern France. Here he
was in almost daily communication with Tsar Alexander, Mettemich,
and Chancellor Hardenberg of Prussia. The latter two agreed with him
on turning Antwerp over to Holland. He expounded to them his plan
of bringing Prussia forward in western Germany and felt that he and
Metternich were close to agreement on the desirability of restoring the
Bourbons in France.
All this served as a helpful preliminary to negotiating with France
at a conference which emerged from the largely useless Frankfurt
Proposals. The conference convened at the picturesque and nearly-
deserted village of Chatillon-sur-Seine in early February 1814, with the
Allies determined to confine France to her frontiers of 1792. Napoleon
was represented by Caulaincourt, his ever-loyal, much-exploited,
former ambassador to Moscow. The conference was held without
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armistice and was subject to swift atmospheric changes as fortunes
fluctuated during the military operations of February. Early in the
month Napoleon had appeared hopelessly in trouble, having been
recently deserted by his last ally, Murat, and having seen the Allies
advance 250 miles in four weeks, overrun a third of France, thrust
armies down the Marne and Seine toward Paris, and probe with
Cossack patrols as far as Orleans; he had then snatched four victories
in five days.
The Allies presented their terms for peace in a document known to us
as the ‘bases de Troyes’, given to Caulaincourt on 17 February. In
this, Castlereagh had been careful to see that the offer of the left bank
of the Rhine was not repeated. Bonaparte might at this time have
ended the war, had he been willing to accept the French frontiers of
1792, the re-birth of a balanced state system, and the loss of most of his
titles. It was his last genuine chance to save his throne, but as the in-
secure head of a dynasty unsanctified by time he felt the ignominy of
accepting a shrunken France, and allowed the offer to lapse.
In spite of the generally favourable stance of the coalition, its many
disagreements were deepened by dismay over the French victories, by
Alexander’s unwillingness to co-operate at Chatillon, and by his bad
relations with Metternich. To meet these difliculties and dissolve the
bad temper, gloom and even panic at headquarters, Castlereagh brought
forward his long-favoured plan for a consolidating alliance. His sug-
gestion served admirably to re-unite the Allies and was swiftly adopted
as the Treaty of Chaumont, signed 9 March and pre-dated 1 March
1814. The alliance established precise conditions for the conduct of the
coalition, provided for 150,000 troops from each of the Four Powers,
bound Britain to supply a subsidy of £5,000,000 for pursuit of the war,
and confirmed through secret articles most of the prior agreements on
the re-creation of the state system. The coalition, thus consolidated,
accepted also the remarkable commitments of Articles 5-16 whereby
the Four Powers agreed to defend each other against any future French
attack by taking the field, each with 60,000 men (or, in the case of Great
Britain, its financial equivalent), the Auxiliary Army to be under the
orders of the power requiring help. Supporting arrangements were
specified in some detail and the agreement was to last twenty years.
The treaty embodied ideas which had been expounded by balance-of-
power writers for a century but which had not previously been written
into an international agreement in such practical fashion. It represented
the emergence of a considerably more sophisticated form of balance-
of-power statesmanship which was soon to be tested in the first years
of peace.
With Napoleon’s continued failure to accept the ‘bases de Troyes’,
the congress of Chatillon disbanded on 19 March and the Allies,
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prodded by Alexander, undertook a direct march on Paris. They ac-
cepted the unusual risk of leaving Napoleon to their rear, but the
strategy worked. A rather listless Paris fell on 30 March 1814, after
Prussian and Russian troops had taken Montmartre, from whose
slopes their cannon could command the city. The occupation of Paris
quickly terminated the long-standing problem of the political succession
in France. During the last months of the war five possible alternatives
had emerged. Mettemich had at various times indicated an interest
in a regency under Marie-Louise for Napoleon’s son, who was half-
Habsburg; Mettemich had also believed there would be advantages in
retaining Napoleon himself on the throne, since the latter had dis-
ciplined the Revolution; Castlereagh had eagerly argued since January
for a restoration of the Bourbons, provided they were sufficiently
acceptable to the French; and Alexander had pressed intermittently for
the accession of Bemadotte, ex-French marshal and prince-royal of
Sweden, or even for a plebiscite by the French people.
From the point of view of the re-creation of a balance of power at
the end of the war, the restoration of the Bourbons was easily the most
desirable alternative. They had the advantage of legitimacy, their
return would not give disproportionate influence to any one foreign
sponsor, their conservative presence on the throne would tend to shut
off the dangerous dynamism of France, and they could without loss of
face accept the anciennes limites, since those were clearly their own
former frontiers. Moreover, public support was evidenced in Bordeaux
in March, and a group in Paris stood ready to establish a government
on behalf of Louis XVIII. It seems reasonably clear that the major
Allies were in agreement on the Bourbons several days before the
occupation of Paris, a conclusion which is strongly suggested by the
toast of diplomatists to the Bourbons during an exuberant gathering at
Dijon on 28 March. Castlereagh, consequently, felt no need to hasten
to Paris to assure the success of a policy to which he was deeply com-
mitted; both he and Mettemich were content to trust the tsar to follow
it.
In the city the moment belonged wholly to Alexander. He arrived
on 31 March in the triumphal military entry and, hearing the mmour
that the Elysee Palace was mined, took up residence in Talleyrand’s
town house on the Rue Saint-Florentin, conveniently located in the
heart of the city. The tsar was now disposed to support, although rather
reluctantly, the restoration of the Bourbons, particularly since he was in
frequent contact with Talleyrand, the chief conspirator in the city
urging their return. Talleyrand’s role has often been misread as that of
chief architect of the restoration, whereas he was merely an astute
consolidator of an already adopted Allied policy. A man of infinite
resource, his more demonstrable and positive contribution was to steer
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the provisional government through the first uncertain days — con-
vening a rump senate on i April to approve immediate measures for
gaining the confidence of the nation, with guarantees of civil liberties
and assurances to officers, bondholders, and owners of property;
seeing that he was himself made one of five members to carry on the
administration and present a draft constitution ; securing a Senate vote
to absolve the nation from loyalty to Napoleon and a further vote on the
proposed constitution. This put defined limits to the royal power, and it
also made clear that neither could the emigres recover their land nor could
the church regain its former position. On 6 April the Senate summoned
to the throne Louis-Stanislas-Xavier de France, an able man and a
devout gastronome, who lay in his Buckinghamshire house of exile,
suffering from one of history’s most inopportune attacks of gout.
Meanwhile Napoleon waited restlessly at the royal chateau of
Fontainebleau, making and discarding plans, treating repeatedly with
Alexander in the first ten days of April, and hoping to salvage for his
son a regency under the empress. Alexander was determined to illus-
trate by Christian forbearance the contrast between Napoleon’s entry
into Moscow and his own arrival in Paris, and offered to soften his
enemy’s fate by granting him a kingdom of his own. Napoleon’s
emissaries, frustrated in most of their demands, were quick to seize this
opportunity, and bargained fiercely. They secured from the tsar the
offer of Elba, a commitment which might have been averted if Castle-
reagh and Metternich had reached Paris earlier. A treaty of abdica-
tion was drawn up and signed. It embodied the Elba arrangement; a
renunciation of the French throne by Napoleon for himself and his
family, although he and the empress could retain their rank and titles;
the granting to the empress of the Parma duchies; and an annual revenue
of 2,000,000 fr. from France to Napoleon, with additional grants to
other members of his family and to Josephine (who died several weeks
later). In spite of the generosity of these terms, Napoleon, when con-
fronted with defeat, abdication and loss of the throne for his son, re-
sorted to a poison which he had carried since 1812 in a small packet
around his neck. It merely made him miserably ill overnight. The next
day, 13 April, he summoned sufficient resolve to ratify the Treaty of
Fontainebleau. A week later he addressed the Imperial Guard in the
court of honour before the chateau, and departed for the south escorted
by foreign officers and wearing at different times a Russian cloak, a
white cockade, and an Austrian uniform — to avoid the insults and
attacks of former subjects. He had never suffered from romantic
impulses to die sword in hand at the head of his troops; and Sir Walter
Scott, accustomed for years to think the diabolical worst of Napoleon,
found him a disappointing Devil.
With Napoleon out of the way and the Bourbon restoration well
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begun, the allied statesmen were able to begin the negotiation of peace
terms with France. Their hope was to settle the terms before turning
to the myriad, non-French problems awaiting action. Through ex-
changes which appear to have been amicable, terms were soon settled
with Talleyrand and signed on 30 May in the treaty known to us as the
First Peace of Paris. This rightly famous document contained a pre-
amble and thirty-three regular articles with certain additional, separate
and secret terms. It returned France generally to the frontiers of
1 January 1792. Actually numerous adjustments were made which
included: the loss of two smallish areas; the addition to France of
over a dozen pre-revolutionary ‘insulated territories’ (the largest of
these enclaves being Avignon and its environs) ; and six separate frontier
gains, including a large one straddling the Meuse Valley and another
large one lying in the beautiful mountain and lake area just south of
Geneva. (The frontier gains did not survive French behaviour in 1815.)
The treaty also seemed French agreement to free navigation of the
Rhine, the enlargement of Holland, the confederating of German
states, independence for Switzerland, the handing over of Italian
territories to Austria, and the retention of Malta by Great Britain.
Plenipotentiaries were to be sent to Vienna within two months to
participate in the general European peace congress. The terms were
generally those of the ‘bases de Troyes’ at the Congress of Chatillon,
which were here written into international law. By secret articles,
France agreed to submit to Allied decisions in the redistribution of
territory about to be undertaken at Vienna. Free navigation was to
obtain on the Scheldt, most of the former Austrian Netherlands was to
pass under the control of Holland, and left bank areas of the Rhine were
to be divided among Holland, Prussia and certain German states. In
this way a buffer area of formidable dimensions was planned on
France’s eastern frontier.
With this First Peace of Paris the allies completed the initial stage of
the arduous journey toward a restored and balanced state system.
Within three months they had bound themselves by the Treaty of
Chaumont, occupied Napoleon’s capital, sent him to his island kingdom,
restored the Bourbons, and written for France a peace treaty free of
indemnities, occupation and humiliation — a peace which Talleyrand
himself described as showing unique consideration. All in all, it
was a brilliant performance, marred importantly only by the Elba
blunder; even this had its uses in smoothing the way to abdication and
thereby diminishing the threat of civil war in France.
Early in June most of the principal statesmen and sovereigns ad-
journed to London to celebrate as guests of the British Government the
return of peace. A hero’s welcome awaited them, especially Tsar
Alexander and Field Marshal von Blucher. The Russian leader
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immensely popular at first but somewhat unnerved by the lack of police
protection, soon exhausted his welcome by numerous gaucheries ,
which were astonishing in a person of his gentleness and sensitivity, and
which cost him the sympathy of the government. His indiscretions were
exceeded only by those of the Grand Duchess Catherine, his sister,
who had preceded him to London and caused general dismay by her
headstrong ill manners and by meddling with the marriage plans for
Princess Charlotte, whose engagement to William of Orange had
recently been arranged. For the celebrities so much time went into
festivities that little business of the coalition was accomplished or even
attempted. On 14 June the Four Powers did agree to transfer the
provisional control of Belgian areas to the House of Orange, as recently
agreed in Paris. They renewed Chaumont, altering the troop commit-
ments of each to 75,000, and decided they must postpone the assembly in
Vienna to September, since Alexander insisted on returning to Russia first.
The most impressive accomplishment of the summer was Castle-
reagh’s negotiated settlement of Anglo-Dutch problems with Hendrik
Fagel. They agreed that Britain should retain areas in Guiana seized
during the war; that Britain would pay Sweden £1,000,000 for
Guadeloupe, which had been promised to Sweden in 1813 but had
reverted to France in the First Peace of Paris; that Britain would
assume one-half (£3,000,000) of the Dutch debt to Russia; and that
Britain would pay Holland £2,000,000 for Cape Colony, also taken by
Britain during the war and now to remain in British hands. The Dutch
agreed to spend this last sum on barrier fortifications against France.
Final details of the frontiers of the new Netherlands were left for the
Congress of Vienna.
One may well be amazed at the diplomatic posture of Britain at this
point. Her foreign secretary had already secured, months before the
opening of the general peace conference at Vienna, the points which he
held to be vital to his country’s interests — the consolidating alliance at
Chaumont which carried over into the post-war period, the return of
the Bourbons to France, the placing of Antwerp and surrounding
Belgian lands under the friendly House of Orange, appropriate territorial
compensation overseas for Britain’s share in the victory, the recent
financial settlement with Holland, and the consensus on the re-creation
of a balanced state system. Castlereagh surely had excellent reasons for
confidence as he prepared for the peace conference.
He was lucky to have done so well, for the scene around him bristled
with problems. For years French armies had devastated Europe.
Behind the glamour of conquest had lain the awful commonplace of
pillaged farms, desecrated churches, and hospitals stinking with
gangrene. In 1814, the time had come for France itself to receive the
same treatment as nearly three-quarters of a milli on enemy troops
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crossed onto her soil. In front of them fragments of dissolving French
armies plucked their own countryside more severely, according to some
observers, than the invaders. Of the latter, the Spaniards, remember-
ing the brutal French occupation, were most ferocious, but were soon
dispatched homeward. There remained the Prussian regulars to loot
towns and chateaux while the Cossack irregulars, brandishing lances
and mounted on dirty ponies, spread terror through the countryside.
A miscellany of soldiers, deserters, and released prisoners of war limped
from village to village, begging their way homeward. Contributing
further to the dislocation were the stagnation of trade and industry,
and the loss of merchant shipping.
There were also myriad political uncertainties as Europe waited for
its statesmen to revive the state system, determine the size, shape and
frontiers of its individual states, establish appropriate regimes for
European waterways, create conditions which would favour the re-
building of European economic life, set up a sound constitution for a
newly confederated Germany, define the relationship of Swiss Cantons
to each other and to the rest of Europe, eradicate the slave trade, deal
with the special problems of the Pope and the Sultan, and establish
a system to protect Europe against the familiar French threat and the
new Russian menace. Of less importance, but very vexing, was the
problem of resolving the perennial quarrels over diplomatic precedence.
To deal with these accumulated difficulties, September produced a
general gathering of the diplomatic clans. To Vienna as guests of
Francis I of Austria came King Frederick I of Wiirttemberg, Elector
William of Hesse, the Hereditary Grand Duke George of Hesse-
Darmstadt, King Maximilian I Joseph of Bavaria, King Frederick VI
of Denmark and Karl August, Duke of Weimar and friend of Goethe.
The King of Prussia, present himself, was accompanied by his white-
haired chancellor, Prince Hardenberg, assisted by the scholarly
Humboldt, and a group of experts, among them the prominent
statistician, Hoffmann. Alexander I of Russia, taking residence in a
splendid apartment in the Hofburg, was supported by the most inter-
national group of advisers at the Congress — the Russian Razumovski;
Nesselrode, his foreign minister of German extraction; Stein, dis-
tinguished reformer and exile from Prussian service; Czartoryski of
Poland; and Pozzo di Borgo, Corsican enemy of Bonaparte. It was
clear, despite the presence of these men, that the tsar intended to
handle many important matters himself.
Louis XVIII did not venture to Vienna. Talleyrand headed the
French delegation, settling himself comfortably in the Kaunitz Palace
on the Johannesgasse, where his niece, the young and beautiful Comtesse
de Perigord, presided as hostess over a household soon renowned for its
elegant cuisine. Talleyrand was assisted principally by the Due de
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Dalberg, an experienced career official now serving as second pleni-
potentiary, and the Comte de La Besnardiere, an intelligent, industrious
figure who had assisted Caulaincourt at Chatillon. They were supported
by a large, fashionable staff. Castlereagh took with him his three
principal European ambassadors : Stewart, his half-brother, an eccentric
and a fool, to whom he was nevertheless deeply attached; Cathcart,
friend of Alexander and ambassador to St Petersburg; and Clancarty, a
hard-working official who had been an effective ambassador to the
Hague, was devoted to the foreign secretary, and served as his principal
assistant. Castlereagh also hired his own embassy staff as insurance
against the Austrian spy system, at that time the most efficient in
Europe. Metternich, as head of the Austrian delegation, was assisted
by von Wessenberg, another diligent career official, by a regular group
of assistants and specialists, and particularly by Friedrich von Gentz, a
most interesting intellectual and publicist, who served both as secretary
to Metternich and as an informal Secretary General of the Congress.
Prominent among the lesser statesmen were Wrede, chief diplomatist
for Bavaria; Cardinal Consalvi, secretary of state for the Pope; and
Munster, able and experienced representative of Hanover.
The Congress served, among other things, as a dazzling festival,
celebrating the attempt by aristocracy and royalty to return to the
remembered magnificence of the eighteenth century. As such it
attracted to Vienna a medley of princes, aristocrats, tourists, beggars,
spies and pickpockets. All came to this most musical of European
capitals where Haydn and Mozart were not long dead, and Beethoven
much alive. The conscientious, conservative and rather ordinary
Emperor of Austria, Francis the First, was an extraordinarily generous
host, although the Austrian treasury was mightily shaken by the
experience. The Festival Committee of the court arranged for its
multitude of guests a rich programme of balls, sleighing and skating
parties, hunts, gala performances, horse-shows and concerts; and there
were many big dinner parties. While much business was, perforce,
carried on at these social affairs, the net result was to give the Congress
a reputation for frivolity and irresponsibility.
Castlereagh arrived in Vienna on 13 September, to be followed
within a few days by the other principal ministers. By the 22nd the four
chief spokesmen had quietly determined in their preliminary meetings
‘that the conduct of the business must practically rest with the leading
Powers’. 1 They wanted not only to confine power to themselves but
to do it in such a way that they might avoid outraging the rest of the
Congress and also evade summoning it into plenary session. These
narrow intentions, slightly broadened by adroit and dramatic objections
from Talleyrand and others, produced the simplest organisation of the
1 B.D., p. 193.
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Congress imaginable. The Four (later Five) retained control of
territorial questions and remained the nerve centre of the conference.
Since the First Peace of Paris had summoned the Congress, its signatories
(the Four plus Portugal, Spain, Sweden and France) were held to
constitute a Committee of Eight, which met numerous times and kept a
formal protocol of its proceedings. In late October the Eight established
a committee to receive credentials. The formal structure of the Congress
was also modestly elaborated with the creation of committees on Swiss
affairs, Italian affairs, rivers, precedence, slave trade, and statistics.
A committee on the German constitution grew up, but was never an
official part of the Congress structure. Plenary sessions were avoided,
and Gentz was correct in his cynical saying that the Congress never met
officially until the signing of the Acte finale.
Diplomatic fireworks did not start until the Russians, who had long
remained secretive concerning their specific aims, began to reveal their
plan, drafted in August and dominated by the principle of compensa-
tions for Russia, Prussia, and Austria. It stood against a unified
Germany; gave most of the Duchy of Warsaw to Russia; Posen, Kulm
and Saxony to Prussia ; and *o Austria, parts of south Germany, north
Italy, and Illyrian Provinces and Dalmatia. These proposed terms lay
at the centre of the biggest and bitterest fight at the Congress, the
struggle over the disposal of Poland and Saxony. Although not
adjacent, these two territories were tightly linked, primarily because
of the tsar’s insistence on the basic Russian formula — that Poland
should go to Russia and Saxony to Prussia. Since Russian troops
occupied both areas, he had scarcely to whisper to be heard with
frightening clarity. The emphasis within his formulation lay on the
Russian gains, and this meant that early Congress activity was primarily
concerned with the Polish half of the formula.
The background of the problem was complicated. As a consequence
of the three Partitions of Poland the Russians had been poised after
1795 on the edge of old Catholic Poland which had formed the bulk
of the Prussian and Austrian gains of ’93 and ’95. Then Napoleon,
after his victories in 1805-6, had taken this region to create the new
Duchy of Warsaw, his satellite outpost in Eastern Europe. The area
was especially significant to Poles, because it lay at the geographical
heart of Polish culture; here Copernicus had lived, here were Cracow
and Warsaw, the great cathedrals and the best land; here in Cracow
Poland’s kings had been crowned and buried. Although obviously
attractive to the Russians, the Duchy territory represented for them a
new advance into an area of rich culture. Its retention by Russia and the
concomitant denial to Prussia and Austria of their former Polish lands
would mean, moreover, that these powers would have to seek adequate
compensation elsewhere.
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Alexander himself was undoubtedly one of the most puzzling, un-
predictable and interesting leaders of his day. Brought up a French
sceptic, he had swung strongly toward a deep Christian commitment ; a
sensitive idealist, he resented and was often unable to cope with the
harsh decisions he had to make; a moralist, he was plagued by the
awareness of a tacit participation in the murder of his father. He
wavered between the cold mechanics of the balance of power, urging
proportions appropriate for maintaining the general equilibrium, and
flights of idealism, distrusted by the others, in which he spoke of his
moral duty to minister to the happiness of the Poles. They were to
enjoy a semblance of national existence in a separate Polish kingdom
linked with Russia.
To Metternich this type of man was alien, and his fuzzy and emotional
policies were anathema. The Austrian minister saw the ideal of
nationalism arising from the French Revolution as the greatest menace
of that era to the house of Habsburg with its rambling structure of mis-
cellaneous nationalities. A thoroughgoing balance-of-power statesman,
content to operate within the tight mechanical assumptions and practices
of that system, he supported Castlereagh’s general ideas: the enlarge-
ment of Holland by the addition to it of the former Austrian Nether-
lands, the accompanying abandonment by Austria of her traditional
defence of the Rhine in favour of Prussia filling the vacuum, and the
confederation of Germany under a conservative Austrian presidency.
He sought to reconstitute Austrian power, particularly in Dalmatia,
the Tyrol, and the Italian lands, and to prevent a preponderating west-
ward expansion of the new Russian menace. To check the latter, he
hoped both Prussia and Austria could regain their Polish lands. When
confronted with the Russian design, however, Metternich knew that to
cede the Duchy lands to Russia would bring the Russian frontier within
175 miles of Vienna. If at the same time Saxony were to be incorporated
into Prussia, the latter would add 200 miles to her existing 250 miles
of common Austro-Prussian frontier. The Russo-Prussian bloc,
already disturbing for Austria, would be positively menacing to her
under these new circumstances ; and Metternich tended to simplify his
policy on this matter into a strategic axiom of risking one-half but not
both halves of the Russian formula : if Russia were to secure the Duchy,
Prussia could not then have Saxony; or conversely, if Prussia received
Saxony, Russia could not have the Duchy.
There was a period during the autumn when it might have been possible
to adopt the latter plan and block Russia on the Duchy, but much
depended on Castlereagh. Freed by the First Peace of Paris from seek-
ing specific British objectives, he now sought a just equilibrium by
working out the barrier system along France’s eastern frontier, by
sufficiently strengthening central Europe to enable it to resist future
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encroachment from either east or west, and by appropriately rewarding
the major powers for their victory over Napoleon. In a remarkable
letter to Wellington on 25 October 1814, 1 he epitomised his reasoning
in this way:
Two alternatives alone presented themselves for consideration — a union of the two
great German Powers, supported by Great Britain, and thus combining the minor
States of Germany, together with Holland, in an intermediary system between
Russia and France — or a union of Austria, France, and the Southern States against
the Northern Powers, with Russia and Prussia in close alliance.
He strongly favoured the first alternative, although this plan was
obviously weakened by the latent rivalry of the two German powers on
whose co-operation it depended. He felt that Russian retention of
Poland smacked of ‘an attempt to revive the system we had all united
to destroy, namely one colossal military Power holding two other
powerful States in a species of dependence and subjection’. 2 While he
supported the ideal of reviving an independent Poland, he thought it
unlikely of realisation, and really desired a re-partitioned Duchy
whereby Prussia and Austria would regain their former lands and the
Russian frontier remain comfortably remote. To secure this generally
anti-Russian position, he was prepared to sacrifice Saxony, if need be,
to the larger need of checking Russia.
From their earliest meeting in mid-September it was evident that
Castlereagh would oppose the tsar’s plans for the Duchy. Their
arguments are detailed in letters and memoranda which they exchanged
in October and November, the British secretary trying to hold Alexander
to his 1813 agreement in the Treaty of Reichenbach to re-partition the
Duchy, and the tsar arguing both that the treaty was no longer binding
and that the equilibrium could be preserved by the Russian plan. With
Alexander acting as his own first minister, Castlereagh was in the
awkward position of a commoner doing battle with royalty. He was not
unpractised in this art, having had frank and extensive exchanges with
the tsar at headquarters in the previous winter, and their meetings now
were a blood-tingling supplement to the daily routine of the Congress.
Although both Castlereagh and Mettemich opposed Alexander over
the disposal of the Duchy, their weight was easily offset by the solid
fact of its occupation by Russia. This circumstance enhanced the
importance of Hardenberg of Prussia whose additional weight might
well be decisive one way or the other. He had come to Vienna agreeing
with Castlereagh’s programme to create a series of barriers against
future French aggression, prominent among them being the secure
establishment of Prussia on the Rhine. He wanted a confederated
Germany under dual Austro-Prussian leadership, a partial return of
Polish areas to Austria and Prussia, gains for Russia in the Duchy, and
1 B.D., p. 218. * B.D., p. 200.
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heavy gains for Prussia in central and west Germany, plus all of
Saxony. He was naturally committed to Prussian aggrandisement,
because Prussia had suffered maximum humiliation at the hands of
Napoleon, but he was not inflexibly bound to any of these areas in
accomplishing it. Restoration mi gh t involve a return to her former
domains, or, depending largely on the extent to which this was not done,
might take the form of new lands. It is surprising that Hardenberg
should not have felt more strongly about the emphasis, for this was an
important crossroads in German history. If restoration took place in
Polish territory, the Prussian gaze would fall on alien lands and her
policy would tend to bring her into conflict with Russia; if restoration
and reward lay primarily inside Germany, her future would be tied
more tightly to her own culture and her policy involve her in conflict
with Austria.
Hardenberg and Metternich had previously considered the possi-
bility of Metternich supporting the cession of Saxony to Prussia, if the
latter would help frustrate Russian designs on Poland. This possibility
conformed to the Austrian axiom, and was finally given substance at
Vienna when Hardenberg secretly wrote to Metternich in October,
promising opposition to the tsar in return for a firm offer of Saxony.
Metternich and Castlereagh, although deeply suspicious of the promise,
decided to accept it, and the former wrote to Hardenberg to that effect
on 22 October. In this letter, described by Gentz as one which gave
Metternich ‘more grief in three months than he has had in all his life’, 1
he made Austrian support for the transfer of Saxony to Prussia condi-
tional upon successful opposition to Russian plans in Poland.
To Castlereagh this marked a notable step toward the realisation of
his preferred plan of a strong centre, based on the co-operation of
Austria and Prussia. Haste was necessary, because of the impending
departure of Alexander on a trip to Hungary, and the three ‘con-
spirators’ met on 24 October to discuss their position and draft a joint
memorandum proposing the Vistula as the Russian frontier. The tsar,
when confronted with the united opposition of the three, erupted in
anger, fulminating against both Hardenberg and Metternich before
their monarchs. His rage did not shake Francis, but it sufficiently
impressed the melancholy and subservient Frederick William to upset
the combination. The joint activity of the three powers was effectively
dissolved, although Hardenberg was not until 5 November given
specific orders by his monarch to withdraw from it. Castlereagh had
made an important mistake in allowing the joint opposition to be
revealed in his absence, and the tsar carried the day. For several more
weeks Castlereagh and Metternich continued to concentrate on the
1 ‘The Vienna Congress’, in Prince Richard Metternich, ed., Memoirs of Prince Metter-
nich, 177 3-18 1$ (London, 1881), vol. n, p. 570.
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Polish half of the Russian formula. However, with no further reason for
them to hope for appropriate concessions from the tsar, they were
compelled to turn to the other half of the formula and block the cession
of Saxony to Prussia, even though they had conditionally promised it
to Hardenberg in October. There was a general accompanying shift of
interest from Poland to Saxony.
The Saxon areas which now came under furious debate were con-
sidered to he at the disposal of the Congress because of Saxony’s support
of Napoleon and its ruler’s tardy conversion to the coalition. This reason
made scant sense; so many princes on so many occasions had found it
expedient to support Napoleon, that in Talleyrand’s famous phrase, it
was no more than ‘a question of date’. The territory in dispute formed
a rough rectangle with a ragged projection flying west toward the
Rhine. It was bisected by the Elbe, lay between Brandenburg and
Bohemia, and was bordered by Prussian power on virtually its entire
northern and eastern boundaries. A relatively prosperous state, it had
good wheat land and lush pasturage in the north, with ancient mines and
picturesque mountains in the south. Of its cities Dresden was sufficiently
far south to be beyond Prussian reach in the event of partition, but
Leipzig lay in a more vulnerable location in west central Saxony.
The shift of interest was dramatised by Metternich’s formal letter of
io December 1814 to Hardenberg, refusing to yield Saxony to Prussia.
In the resulting frenzy there were bitter recriminations, leading Castle-
reagh- to reiterate to his government his recent warnings of the danger
of war. A conflict of Britain with her recent allies, fantastic as it
seemed, remained a hideous possibility until well after the Christmas
season. Meanwhile a new phase of the Congress began when Harden-
berg and Metternich secured Castlereagh’s agreement to intervene on
the Saxon problem. It came at a most unpromising and discouraging
moment, and involved Castlereagh in matters in which he was clearly
instructed by the Cabinet to avoid anything that would commit his
country to war. He was himself the most European-minded member
of it, more keenly aware than his colleagues of the value to them of
a sound territorial balance of power on the continent, and was prepared
to disregard their official instruction at this critical point in the negotia-
tions. One of the nagging difficulties of the autumn had been the per-
sistent disagreement among the negotiators over the statistical aspects
of matters under discussion. Castlereagh proposed to create a separate
statistical committee which could, with the help of Hoffmann, the dis-
tinguished Prussian statistician, work out an agreed set of figures for areas
and the ‘souls’ that inhabited them. The committee had six sessions
between 24 December and 19 January, and its labours were helpful.
For Talleyrand the moment of opportunity had finally arrived. He
had come to Vienna in September as the head of the delegation of a
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defeated power, theoretically excluded from inner decisions by his own
signature to the secret articles of the First Peace of Paris, and practically
prevented from participation by the success of the leading powers in
retaining the initiative themselves. Much has been made of his espousal
of ‘that sacred principle of legitimacy’, 1 which has often, and erro-
neously, been described as the dominating theme of the peace con-
ference. Talleyrand himself made the matter clear. He came fortified
with the most explicit directive of any of the participating statesmen —
in the form of the elaborate King’s Instructions, conceived by himself
and probably drafted by La Besnardiere. In it he held legitimacy to be
the best device for stabilising the separate entities of the state-system,
but found that the creation of a sound balance of power must be the
governing conception for Europe as a whole. According to the In-
structions, he accepted the perpetual neutrality of Switzerland, he sought
to limit Prussian gains in west Germany, to check her power within the
new confederation, which itself should not be strong, and to prevent
Prussia from regaining her pre-Tilsit power; he wanted to limit Austrian
penetration of northern Italy and to contain Russian expansion, either
by restoring an independent Poland or by returning to the status of the
last partition. It was clearly a traditionally French, balance-of-power
position, and equally clearly aimed at generally minimising compensa-
tions to the members of the coalition.
Talleyrand at Vienna showed extraordinary virtuosity. Refusing to
accept as permanent France’s exclusion from the inner meetings of the
peace conference, he devoted most of his energy to working his way in.
By offering leadership to the disgruntled representatives of the medium-
sized and small powers, he was able to harass and embarrass the states-
men of the leading powers. In his eagerness to limit the compensation
of Prussia, he stood for denying Saxony to her and thus, in October,
annoyed Castlereagh, Hardenberg, and Metternich, who were then deep
in their united enterprise. Castlereagh felt that Talleyrand should have
co-operated in checking Russia before everything else; Talleyrand, often
praised for his prediction of the defeat of Castlereagh and Metternich
over Poland, might have prevented that defeat if he had stood with
them against the tsar during October. This point, however, remains
speculative, and whatever one thinks of his conduct in the autumn, his
stock had risen noticeably by wintertime.
Early in December, when Castlereagh wrote to Liverpool particularly
discouraging news about the possibility of war, he also suggested that
Britain might best act with France in joint intervention or armed media-
tion. On the 1 2th Talleyrand sent Metternich a written overture for
alliance, and, receiving encouragement, repeated it a week later. Shortly
thereafter, the creation of the Statistical Committee served inadvertently
1 Due de Broglie, ed., Memoirs of the Prince de Talleyrand (London, 1891-2), vol. n, p. 203.
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as the point of entry for Talleyrand into the inner councils of the
Congress. Arriving unwanted at the first meeting, he successfully
resisted expulsion by threatening to withdraw the French delegation
from Vienna. Having crossed the threshold, he still had to penetrate
the inner sanctum of the Four. The time for that, too, was now at hand.
Castlereagh, although aware of the rapprochement between Talley-
rand and Metternich, had until Christmas been chary of giving them
any explicit indication of his interest in an alliance. However, with the
Four Powers still deadlocked over the disposition of Saxony, he finally
unbent and indicated that he was now ready both to enter a treaty
relationship and to urge the acceptance of Talleyrand within the inner
group of ministers. When the Four Powers met on 29 December,
Castlereagh and Metternich demanded that Talleyrand be included in
the top ministerial council, thereby expanding the Four to Five. Their
request evoked highly agitated responses from Hardenberg and
Nesselrode, who naturally sought to evade any arrangement giving three
votes to their two on the Saxon issue. The Prussian chancellor, usually
discreet and usually able through his deafness to avoid hearing what he
disliked, not only heard the proposal but was moved to declare in the
meeting of 31 December that a refusal to cede Saxony to Prussia was
tantamount to war. Castlereagh, stirred to his cold depths, asserted
that it might be best to abandon the Congress. The old year went out in
an atmosphere of anger, bitterness and frustration, and with former
allies staring into the dark abyss of war.
On New Year’s Day, when a sudden war move by Prussia was
feared, Castlereagh took the decisive step of submitting a draft of an
alliance to Metternich and Talleyrand. Their discussions were soon
completed, and on 3 January 1815, they signed a Triple Alliance which
promised mutual support against an attacker, specified 150,000 troops
from France and Austria with an equivalent from Great Britain, and
provided for inviting Bavaria, Hanover and the Netherlands to adhere,
as they later did. On the same day Nesselrode and Hardenberg tried to
secure a compromise on Saxony before France should be included in the
Five Power arrangement. When no progress was discernible Harden-
berg informed Castlereagh that he would himself call for the inclusion
of the French plenipotentiary. The statesmen thus squeezed past the
most dangerous period of the winter crisis over Saxony, and this most
bitter phase of the Conference was over. Talleyrand reported ecstatically
to Louis XVIII: ‘Now, Sire, the coalition is dissolved, and for ever.
Not only does France no longer stand alone in Europe, but . . . France
is in concert with two of the greatest Powers, and three States of the
second order’. 1
1 G. Pallain, ed., The Correspondence of Prince Talleyrand and King Louis XVlll
(London, 1881), vol. 1, p. 242.
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It was now clear that compromise could be achieved, although the
process of working it out proved to be very difficult. Hardenberg had,
to be sure, indicated that an accommodation was possible, but he
continued to claim all of Saxony for bargaining purposes. Metternich,
now buoyed by the alluring prospect of blocking Prussia, assumed the
opposite bargaining stance of refusing the Prussians any part of Saxony.
It remained for a hard-pressed and hard-working Castlereagh to draw
them toward a suitable compromise. He was considerably helped by
the fact that the new western frontier of Poland had been virtually
settled on 3 January, when Metternich had placed before the ‘Con-
ference of the Four Courts’ the Austrian counter-project to the formal
Russian proposals of 30 December. This document revealed Austria
still to be in strong disagreement with Russia over Saxony, but in
complete accord with her on the western boundary of Poland. Their
agreement really determined the frontier which was written into the
Final Act of the Congress in June. It had the effect of weakening
Hardenberg’s bargaining position on Saxony because the Russians,
having secured their own chief aim, were now less eager to risk war over
gains for the Prussian ally. Through use of this advantage Castlereagh
secured the tsar’s support for compromise on Saxony, and was then
able to devote the remainder of January to modifying the intransigence
of Metternich and Hardenberg.
From a median position Castlereagh and Talleyrand worked first on
Metternich to reduce and confine the Austrian demands. Castlereagh
found Francis I belligerent, but, helped by Munster, was able to make
satisfactory headway. Metternich responded by placing before the Five
Powers on 28 January a formal offer to Prussia of substantial areas of
Saxony without Leipzig; and Castlereagh proceeded to confront the
Prussians, especially on the latter point. Failing with Hardenberg, he
went over the chancellor’s head to Frederick William and had the
most painful interview of all. Turning to the tsar for help, he secured
for Prussia the good offer of Thorn, controlling the middle Vistula, plus
surrounding territory. When the Prussians gave way on Leipzig, he
hounded them to reduce their demands on the remainder of Saxony,
persuaded Hanover to sweeten the prospect by granting moderate
cessions to Prussia in central Germany, and then offered on his own a
part of the new Netherlands. Hardenberg, after another unsuccessful
try for Leipzig, finally settled on 6 February for slightly more than half
of Saxony’s land, without Leipzig, and for slightly less than half of
Saxony’s ‘souls’. Metternich agreed at once, as did Talleyrand, who
had long acted as self-styled champion of the Saxons. The Saxon crisis
was over, except for the awkwardness of presenting the details of the
partition to the king of that unhappy land, a task which was performed
in March by Metternich, Talleyrand and Wellington.
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The over-all Prussian gains comprised two other principal areas: the
land in the west and that in Poland. The renewal of Prussian power
in the Rhineland was substantial; it meant that Prussia came forward
with appreciable strength, a matter of unusual significance. The Polish
section, although only one-sixth of the Duchy and much less than
Prussia’s former possessions there, was by no means negligible. It was
larger than the gains in Saxony and embraced a useful section of the
Vistula, the entire Netze, and over half of the Warta. Together with a
previous agreement by Alexander to return part of Poland to Austria,
it amounted to a noteworthy reduction of the uncompromising Russian
demands of the late autumn. Castlereagh had indeed made a strong
return after his apparently severe defeat on Poland.
The solution of the Saxon question made possible numerous decisions
which were contingent on it. Bavaria, long in disagreement with Austria
over the return of certain areas which had been lost in 1805 and 1809,
finally gave way and was compensated in Wurzburg and part of the
Palatinate. Mainz, coveted by both Bavaria and Prussia, became a
confederation fortress under Hessian sovereignty. The former Electorate
of Hanover, Britain’s outpost in Europe and a recent victim of Napoleon,
now emerged as a kingdom and received frontier increments, especially
in the west between the Dutch frontier and the Duchy of Oldenburg.
These gains gave possession of the lower Ems to Hanover, which
already held strong positions on the Elbe and the Weser. England was
in the remarkable position, through her sponsorship of the Netherlands,
her re-instatement in Hanover and her retention of Heligoland, of
having some control over all rivers between France and Denmark.
The evolution of an agreement on the new Germanic Confederation
proved particularly slow and difficult. In repeated agreements in the
spring of 1814, a confederation had been declared acceptable to the
major powers. This conception had been challenged by those patriots,
among them Stein, who sought a German Empire, but their dream had
faded by the time the Congress opened. At Vienna one of the first
decisions of the leading powers had been to leave the drafting of a new
German constitution to the Germans themselves. In meetings in
October and November 1814, the self-appointed German committee of
Austria, Prussia, Bavaria, Wurttemberg and Hanover discussed various
constitutional drafts, and soon reached a stalemate, just as the Four
Powers did over the Saxon problem. Disagreement prevailed and for
five months meetings were suspended. Upon resumption in the spring
of 1815, an Austrian draft initiated progress toward compromise, and
agreement — complete in most but not all details — was finally reached
early in June. The new Germanic Confederation of thirty-four princes
and four free cities would have a Diet under Austrian presidency, with
representatives from the member states, and a voting differential. The
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constitution included stipulations against separate negotiations of the
princes in time of war and against their concluding alliances inimical to
the good of all. There were no federal arrangements, no common
currency or effective executive, and no safeguards of popular liberties.
While it created only a weak union, it did bring some order to the
political chaos of Germany, and partly realised Castlereagh’s dream of
the strong centre by drawing both Prussia and Austria into the same
structure.
The Netherlands frontier, which had been generally determined in the
previous summer and tinkered with more recently, was now carefully
completed. In addition to the Belgian provinces, the new kingdom
secured Liege and the Duchy of Limbing. The king also received the
Duchy of Luxembourg, although it was to remain outside the Nether-
lands, become a member of the Germanic Confederation, and accom-
modate a Prussian garrison in the city of Luxembourg itself.
Another Congress stalemate involved Prussia and the Scandinavian
powers and derived from the failure of Bernadotte to carry out the
financial terms of the Treaty of Kiel of the previous year, by which he
was bound to indemnify Denmark for her loss of Norway to Sweden.
Britain’s spring payment in 1815 to Sweden for Guadeloupe (which
reverted to France) broke the impasse and put in motion a triangle of
related transfers by which Prussia gave Lauenburg to Denmark,
Denmark yielded Norway to Sweden, and Sweden released her bit of
Pomerania to Prussia. The changes were particularly distasteful to the
Norwegians and particularly important for Sweden. Indeed, for the
latter, 1814-15 witnessed the disappearance of the last remnant of her
empire on the continent with a consequent elimination of a distracting
involvement, and an end to her participation in European wars and
alliances.
Metternich largely determined the Italian settlement, a complex
affair, stalemated for months and unsolved until May 1815. The
central, complicating fact was the alliance of January 1814, between
Austria and Joachim Murat, King of Naples, a rash and successful
cavalry leader, and husband of Napoleon’s youngest sister. Murat had
bartered his defection to the coalition for Austrian support of his
throne. This daring manoeuvre worked successfully for Murat in 1814,
but Metternich, thus committed, found himself entangled with Talley-
rand, who sought to oust Murat and restore the legitimate Spanish
Bourbon monarch. Metternich resorted to evasions and postpone-
ments. Even when pressure at the Congress drove Great Britain, France,
and Austria together, and made agreement between the latter two
particularly desirable, Metternich contrived further delays. The
problem remained until Murat himself solved it during the excitement
of the Hundred Days by his further gamble on switching back to
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WAR AND PEACE IN AN AGE OF UPHEAVAL
Napoleon and attempting to raise Italy against Austria. We now
know that he had no obvious alternative, since Metternich and Castle-
reagh had already secretly agreed to unseat him. In any event he
soon failed, fled to France, later returning to south Italy where he
was caught and shot. The Hundred Days considerably hastened the
achievement of an Italian settlement by reducing the complicated
relations between Murat and Austria to simple hostility, as well as by
undercutting French opposition to Austrian policy in the Italian
peninsula — thus apparently vindicating Metternich’s policy and
suggesting how triumphant procrastination can be.
The Italian impasse suddenly yielded; Naples went to the Bourbons,
borders of the remaining areas were quickly designated, and a peninsular
state-system of eight units was established, four going under the
Habsburgs. The Austrian Emperor directly ruled the new Lombardo-
Venetian Kingdom. His brother returned to the Grand Duchy of
Tuscany; his daughter received the Parma Duchies; and his grandson,
the Duchy of Modena. Papal authority was re-established in central
Italy, and the strengthened Kingdom of Sardinia in the north-west
recovered the island itself, Piedmont, Savoy and Nice, with the addition
of Liguria (Genoa). Lucca went to a Parma Bourbon (Chapter XV,
pp. 429, 438).
The complex Swiss problems of frontier, constitution and foreign
relationship, were generally resolved by March in the special committee
which had been created for that purpose. The settlement provided for
a loose union among twenty-two cantons and for adjusted frontiers.
The powers promised to guarantee Swiss neutrality, a sound and states-
manlike proposal which the Swiss had initiated and now formally
enacted in November.
As agreements were reached they were often signed separately with
the understanding that they would later be assembled in one com-
prehensive treaty. The ultimate compilation of 12 1 articles, garnished
with numerous annexes and protocols, was signed as the Acte finale by
the assembled plenipotentiaries of the powers, great and small, on
9 June 1815. The ceremony was held in the vast Schonbrunn palace,
which in that era presided over a country setting beyond the city limits
of Vienna. In addition to the territorial arrangements, the treaty
embraced a host of items, among them the titles of various German
princes, indemnities of one to another, the levy of (or exemption from)
transit dues on specified roads, the privileges of drovers and shepherds
in areas which had changed hands, navigation rights on rivers traversing
different states and the maintenance of towpaths for Europe’s economic-
ally important rivermen. It also included a solution to the ancient
vexations of diplomatic precedence, which were henceforth to be deter-
mined first by class (1. ambassadors, legates, and nuncios; 2. envoys
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and ministers; 3. charges d'affaires) and then by length of assignment.
By this simple arrangement European diplomatists gracefully escaped
from painful and absurd difficulties.
Considerably less success attended the attempt to secure inter-
national action on the slave trade. Great Britain, after a century of
riches for her slave merchants shuttling between West Africa and the
New World, had recently prohibited the traffic herself, and now sought
to suppress the entire trade, which, like that in opium (ironically expand-
ing in that era largely through British initiative), could be dealt with
effectively only through international agreement. By the failure to
include any solid regulation in the First Peace of Paris, Castlereagh had
left his party open to attack from Wilberforce and the powerful anti-
slavery movement, with the further consequence that the foreign secre-
tary was particularly eager at Vienna to secure an agreement of sub-
stance — motivated more, to be sure, by political pressures than by his
own inner impulses. Although many of the powers of the first and
second rank accepted the idea of practical regulation, France, Spain and
Portugal did not. Castlereagh, by persistent badgering of the Latin
delegates, secured a February declaration from the powers that the slave
trade was ‘repugnant to the principles of humanity and universal
morality’, and that they agreed in the ‘wish of putting an end to a
scourge which has so long desolated Africa, degraded Europe, and
afflicted humanity’. Portugal accepted abolition north of the equator,
but Castlereagh was unable to get more. Inadequate as this was, it
did serve as a first step toward agreement which followed in the post-
war period. The Hundred Days, oddly enough, soon helped the British
cause, because Napoleon outlawed the trade for Frenchmen, and Louis
XVIII could not avoid re-affirming his decision.
While the Congress of Vienna was jogging to a close, events of mighty
consequence gripped the attention of Europeans. During the night of
6-7 March 1815, the news of Napoleon’s escape from Elba arrived
in Vienna. He had by that time landed at Antibes and started
on the glamorous return which caused French troops, from Grenoble
on, to rally once more to his standard. Within two weeks of his
departure from Elba, he was installed at the Tuileries and speedily
assembling a new government. Louis XVIII had ignominiously fled to
Ghent.
In Vienna there was virtually spontaneous agreement that the return
of Napoleon was incompatible with the peace of Europe, and on
13 March the eight signatories of the First Peace of Paris signed a joint
statement declaring that Napoleon Bonaparte, having ‘placed hims elf
outside of civil and social relations, and . . . delivered himself to public
hatred’, was an outlaw. Plans were swiftly adopted to guard against a
new French eruption: British and Hanoverian troops under Wellington
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were to defend the lower Rhine, Prussians to be in reserve there and
hold the mid-Rhine, with Russians and Austrians to the south.
Confronted once again by the French threat, the statesmen at
Vienna quickly resumed their familiar posture as partners in a coalition.
On 25 March they signalised their return to the principles of Chaumont
by agreeing to a document of nine articles in which they reaffirmed the
First Peace of Paris and agreed that each of the Four Powers should
supply 150,000 troops, that no separate peace could be made, and that
the Treaty of Chaumont would continue in effect when the war emer-
gency was over. Great Britain separately agreed to provide subsidies up
to £5,000,000. Numerous smaller powers rallied to the coalition, which
soon included Hanover, Bavaria, Sardinia, Portugal, Holland, Baden,
Saxony and many others. Thus the coalition was re-formed and set in
motion with a skill and speed unequalled in European history up to that
time. Conditions were, to be sure, ideal for such efficiency: statesmen
and soldiers were assembled in Vienna, armies lay at hand, subsidies
were soon promised, and a common danger was dramatised by
Bonaparte’s return.
Napoleon, with his old enemies closing ranks, attempted to split
the new coalition, particularly by sending to Alexander the French copy
of the secret Treaty of 3 January 1815, which he found in the Tuileries.
With the failure of this manoeuvre he turned to the pressing crisis which
his return had created. He was all but diplomatically isolated, since
only Murat of Naples had rallied to his cause. Moreover, Louis XVIII
in one of his few popular moves had abolished conscription and left
for Napoleon an army of probably not more than 200,000. The
Emperor, swift in the use of emergency preparations and makeshifts,
aided by the return of many of his former officers, and appeasing
the now stronger liberal sentiment of France by promising a liberal
constitution, made ready to attack the coalition. By attempting to deny
his enemies time to draw together, he hoped to defeat them separately.
His initial moves into the Netherlands gained him precious time which
he then unaccountably wasted; Wellington, on assurances of support
on his left from the Prussians, chose to stand at Mont St Jean ; Napoleon’s
army on 18 June 1815, in the battle of Waterloo, narrowly failed to
dislodge Wellington’s and was then routed by the latter, assisted finally
by the Prussians, who had been delayed by muddy roads and arrived
almost fatally late. The tens of thousands of casualties, French,
Prussian, Hanoverian, Dutch and British were a direct consequence of
the tsar’s blundering generosity in granting Elba to Napoleon.
The new Senate and Legislative Body in Paris defiantly put themselves
in permanent session. Napoleon, having fled the battlefield, now con-
sidered establishing a tight dictatorship and ruthlessly purging his
enemies, only to discard the idea and resign in favour of his son. He
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was aware that the latter would never have a real opportunity to mount
the throne. Louis XVIII, urged on by Wellington and unhampered this
time by gout, was back on French soil by 25 June, and four days later
the first Prussian troops had appeared on the outskirts of Paris.
Bliicher, determined to offer the city the alternatives of assault or
unconditional surrender, was softened by Wellington, who was in-
flexible in insisting on mild terms for the French. Capitulation was
soon effected through the efforts of Fouche of the police and Davout
of the army, both men playing key roles, along with Wellington, in the
return of the Bourbons. The allies staged a second triumphal entry
into Paris on 7 July, and the next day Louis XVIII was back in the
Tuileries.
Napoleon, at Malmaison in late June, had very nearly been caught by
the Prussians. Bliicher would happily have shot him, but he dropped
from Allied view for ten days. During this period he travelled to the
west coast port of Rochefort, tried to arrange to escape to the United
States on a French boat, found it hopeless in the face of west winds and
the British blockade, and surrendered to Captain Maitland of the
Bellerophon, declaring in his letter to the Prince Regent that he came
‘like Themistocles, to throw . . . [himself] upon the hospitality of the
British people’. 1 He was conveyed to Plymouth, held on board ship
while the curious crowded the harbour, and soon taken to his desolate
destination on St Helena.
Since many statesmen interpreted the Hundred Days as evidence of
the failure of the policy of moderation toward France in the First
Peace of Paris, the old demands to weaken her by partition blossomed
anew. Some changes evidently had to be made. In mid-July, the allies
established a Committee of Four, which met repeatedly during the sum-
mer and autumn to formulate the new terms for France. Although the
Four agreed on the aim of blunting French power, their summer meet-
ings were saturated with disagreements as to the means. Hardenberg,
responsive to pressures from the Prussian generals, represented one
extreme by insisting that French power be diminished through the
handing over of three historic chains of fortresses — built by Vauban —
to Switzerland, the German states and the Netherlands, plus the
cession of all of Savoy and Alsace-Lorraine. Castlereagh stuck to the
line of moderation. He had wanted and seen achieved the defeat of
Napoleon and the return of Louis XVIII. Now, in spite of dissident
sentiment in the cabinet, he sought to prevent a vengeful peace. Liver-
pool, although not fanatic in favouring harshness, did urge on him the
need to act against the war criminals. ‘Forbearance manifested at the
present moment can be considered in no other light than weakness, and
not mercy. ... A severe example made of the conspirators who brought
1 J. Holland Rose, The Life of Napoleon /, 6th edn. (London, 1913), vol. n, p. 520.
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back Buonaparte could alone have any effect.’ 1 Castlereagh disapproved,
and merely went through the motions of carrying out his instructions,
hoping that the war criminals would prudently absent themselves. He
also disapproved of partition of France since it would humiliate and
weaken the new government and render the country a less stable unit
in the European equilibrium. He would consent to check French power
by temporary devices, and hoped that a positive reliance on the
principles of Chaumont would help to prevent future trouble. From
Wellington he received solid and invaluable support for these policies.
Metteraich stood somewhat closer to Castlereagh than to Harden-
berg. He believed that the allies should insist on occupation, indemnity,
and limited territorial cessions, with the intent of converting France
from an offensive to a secure defensive power. Specifically, he felt that
her first line of fortresses should either be destroyed or given to neigh-
bouring powers. Castlereagh and Metteraich discovered to their great
relief that Alexander had returned to Paris in one of his most benevolent
moods. With Russian interests not directly involved, the tsar favoured
their policy of moderation over the harsh designs of his Prussian ally.
He emphasised the unity of the coalition and wanted to renew
Chaumont. He had increasingly turned toward religion since 1812,
and been through a deeply moving religious experience in the spring of
1815, which made a strong impression on Russian policy throughout
the year and which doubtless explains much of his gentleness in this
period.
With Alexander, Castlereagh and Wellington in agreement and
Metteraich not far off, preponderance clearly lay with a policy of
moderation. Hardenberg, although isolated, pressed his country’s
demands vigorously, and Castlereagh had such difficulty in getting
Cabinet support that he finally sent his half-brother to London to
demand the necessary backing. Hardenberg indicated on 28 August
that he would moderate his position, and Alexander, eager to avert a
humiliating setback for Prussia, said that he would support moderate
territorial cessions from France. By early September the Committee of
Four was in substantial agreement. The terms, which they presented
to France on 20 September, were disconcertingly rejected by Talley-
rand just before he was replaced, but his successor, the Due de
Richelieu, soon accepted a slightly altered version.
Following several weeks of final drafting, on 20 November 1815
the powers finally signed the documents comprising the Second Peace of
Paris, with their guarantee of Swiss neutrality and a new Quadruple
Alliance. France received, with some modification, the frontiers of
1790, failing to keep the considerably more generous lines of the First
Peace of Paris. The most important change was the transfer to Prussia
1 B.D., pp. 345-6.
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of the Saar, although its full economic importance was not yet discovered.
The terms also provided for the destruction of the fortress of Huninguen,
the occupation of France for three to five years by a force not to
exceed 150,000 troops, and the payment of an indemnity of 700 million
francs. Earlier, France had been required to surrender most of the art
treasures which she had plundered from the rest of Europe.
In the new Quadruple Alliance the Allies agreed to maintain the
Second Peace of Paris, to prevent the return of Napoleon, and to stand
solidly behind the occupation forces, each signatory power agreeing to
supply 60,000 additional troops, or more if necessary. Article VI, in
conformity with the spirit of Chaumont, provided for periodic con-
ferences of sovereigns or ministers ‘to facilitate and to secure the
execution of the present Treaty’, to consult upon ‘common interests’,
and to consider ‘measures which . . . shall be considered the most
salutary for the repose and prosperity of Nations, and for the mainten-
ance of the Peace of Europe ’. Article VI established the legal basis for
the diplomacy by conference of the post-war era, an interesting and note-
worthy experiment in international administration. It represented an
attempt, by Castlereagh particularly, to carry over into the post-war
world some of the experience with coalitions of the leading powers, and
it ‘marked definitely the ascendancy of the Great Powers and the
principle of the European Concert’. 1
A very different device for shoring up the peace settlement appeared
with the tsar’s Treaty of the Holy Alliance, which he hoped his fellow
monarchs would sign and by which they would make of themselves ‘a
true and indissoluble fraternity’, swearing to base their conduct of
foreign affairs on the ‘precepts of . . . Holy Religion, namely the pre-
cepts of Justice, Christian Charity, and Peace, which, far from being
applicable only to private concerns, must have an immediate influence
on the councils of Princes’. While the tsar ascribed the immediate
origins of the Holy Alliance to a February conversation with Castle-
reagh, his elaboration of the idea owed much to his older interest in the
New Testament and something to the influence of Mme de Kriidener,
who helped him as a religious mentor in the summer of 1815. Deeply
serious as Alexander doubtless was, Metternich and Castlereagh could
only greet the project with cynicism. To Liverpool Castlereagh
characterised it as ‘this piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense’. 2
It was signed by Alexander’s fellow sovereigns on 26 September 1815,
through fear of his power, as a concession to his exalted mood, and after
Metternich had managed to make significant textual changes; but it was
not a serious act of statesmanship on their part, nor did it assume any
importance in the diplomacy of 1815.
1 Webster, Congress of Vienna (London, 1918), p. 143.
* B.D., p. 383.
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A glance at the territorial provisions of the Final Act of Vienna and
the Second Peace of Paris reveals that they followed the twin principles
of containment and reciprocal compensation— the former for France,
and the latter for her enemies. An arc of containment, conforming
markedly to some of the important recommendations of Pitt and
Castlereagh, now extended along France’s eastern frontier, its chief
ingredients being somewhat new and experimental — the expanded
Netherlands anchoring the north; the enlargement of Prussia’s holdings
in the west and the substitution of Prussian for Austrian defence of the
Rhine; the strengthening of Bavaria, Baden and Wurttemberg; the
international guarantee of a neutral Switzerland; and the enlarged
kingdom of Sardinia to anchor the southern end. By way of Hanover,
Britain could join Prussia in backing up the north, while Austria,
through her north Italian holdings, could do the same for the south.
Thus the territorial allocations provided substantial security against
future disturbances of the balance of power by France.
While the frontiers of France herself returned almost exactly to those
of 1790, new boundaries were common to her east: Sweden acquired
Norway; Austria, extensive territory in Italy; and Russia, most of
Poland (before the peace settlement of 1814-15 she had also secured
Finland and Bessarabia). To Prussia went Swedish Pomerania and
parts of Saxony, Poland and western Germany. Britain retained
important overseas areas, secured the expansion of her Dutch client-
state and saw Hanover enlarged. Many arrangements which had taken
so long to evolve were disappointingly impermanent. Within fifteen
years the enlarged Netherlands was breaking up, and the Bourbon
Restoration had come to an end in France ; two years later Nicholas I
had revoked the Polish constitution; soon Hanover’s tie with Great
Britain was dropped, and the treaty status of Cracow, established at
Vienna as a neutral Free City, overthrown. Between 1859 and 1871
both the Italian and German settlements collapsed, with the ejection of
Austria from her compensations in Italy, the dissolution of the Germanic
Confederation, Austria’s concomitant loss of her presidency of the
Confederation, and the ordering of the German atoms in a new system
under Bismarck. French boundaries were enlarged as a result of
arrangements between Napoleon III and Cavour, and later reduced
by the German seizure of Alsace and Lorraine. In general, the terms of
1814-15 were modified sooner, oftener and more profoundly than were
those in the treaties of Westphalia and Utrecht.
In contrast to these changes, a relatively permanent part of the
1814-15 settlement proved to be the east German frontier between
Cracow and the Baltic, although subsequent changes occurred on each
side of the line and the line itself did not survive 1914. The union of
Norway and Sweden outlived the nineteenth century, as did the
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acquisition by Britain of Ceylon and Cape Colony. More permanent
yet were: the French frontier between Metz and the Channel, although
the east side of the line soon passed from Dutch to Belgian control; the
arrangements concerning Switzerland, territorial and otherwise, which
continue today ; the agreement on diplomatic precedence, still operative
although now more elaborate ; and the retention by Britain of Malta.
The settlement as a whole, unfair in many respects, incomplete in
numerous details, destined to be thus endlessly revised, was yet remark-
ably consistent with the ideal of re-establishing in Europe a balanced
state system. Indeed, it represented the last great European peace
settlement consciously based on the principles of the balance of power.
These principles, soon to be discredited by nineteenth-century liberal
criticism, had enjoyed widespread acceptance and application in the
eighteenth century, to be followed by large-scale abuse during the
generation from 1792 to 1814, and had only recently been restored to a
position of honoured usefulness in European statecraft, as is evident in
the major decisions of the peace-making: the Bourbon restoration, the
moderation of the First Peace of Paris, the use of reciprocal compensa-
tion in the distribution of rewards at Vienna, Castlereagh’s conception
of the strong centre, Metternich’s attitude toward joint Russo-Prussian
gains, and the guarded moderation of the Second Peace of Paris. The
repeated renewals of Chaumont, culminating in the Quadruple Alliance,
underlined a concept which derived out of equilibrist experience and
envisaged an improved method of preserving the balance of power.
The period 1814-15 is indeed one of the best examples of Europe’s
classical balance of power in operation. Uncounted documents of the
period utilise its terminology, acts of all description were justified in
equilibrist terms, plans of all and sundry commonly embodied its
concepts and aims.
The theory of equilibrium, although clearly dominating the peace
settlement, did not pervade it to the exclusion of other conceptions.
Legitimacy claimed much support, but even Talleyrand, its high priest
at Vienna, regarded it as a subordinate ingredient of the more com-
prehensive theory of the balance of power. The principle of nationality,
violent and disturbing offspring of the French Revolution, had its
adherents, notably Stein in his German policies and Alexander in plans
for Poland, but gained no significant victories beyond these. State-
interest, one of the obvious motivations of powers at the Congress,
was a persistent attraction for individual statesmen. Nevertheless, it
was generally subordinated to the balance of power, because the
exorbitant demands of individuals could be met by group resistance of
the other leading statesmen, particularly since the fundamental fact in
international relations of the period was the relatively equal power of
five states, a condition where no one state could dominate the others.
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One of the most interesting problems in interpreting 1814-15 is the
evaluation of the relative importance of the leading participants.
While earlier generations were content to award top honours to
Metternich, it is now harder to argue that any individual dominated,
although each of the leading statesmen had his moments of importance
and made significant contributions. Alexander assumed responsibility
for the direct march on Paris in 1814, joined in giving timely support
to moderation in handling France and, by winning on Poland at the
Congress of Vienna, moulded virtually the entire Congress settlement
and also gave Russia her greatest westward extension of influence up
to that time. Hardenberg secured, through fat compensations, the full
return of Prussia to her former power, and saw her take over from
Austria the responsibility of defending the western frontier of the
Germanies. Metternich successfully frustrated the original Russian
formula, was very important in preventing Prussia from gaining all of
Saxony, and i nfl uenced other German decisions. His hand above
others shaped the Italian settlement and the re-establishment there of
Austrian power. Castlereagh was architect of the Treaty of Chaumont,
more influential than any other both in restoring the Bourbons and
securing a moderate peace for their new government, author (as Pitt’s
heir) of the arc of containment on France’s eastern frontier, and more
useful than any other individual in mediating between Prussia and
Austria in the crisis over Saxony during the difficult winter diplomacy
at Vienna. He was, in addition, author of the important Quadruple
Alliance of 20 November 1815, which provided a really new departure
for post-war diplomacy. He was vilified by some and misunderstood
by many, but research in this century has demonstrated his genuine
distinction.
Thus each, with the exception of Talleyrand, secured large territorial
accessions for his country, and Talleyrand gave timely assistance in the
restoration of the Bourbons, resourcefully worked his way into the
inner deliberations of the Congress, and was to some degree responsible
for salvaging part of Saxony. Whatever the verdict on their individual
contributions, one should observe how they, in contrast to their heirs
in 1919, viewed the continent as a unit and saw its problems as parts of
an international whole. They were both a resourceful and a remarkable
group of statesmen.
As a group they have occasionally been complimented for establish-
ing a century of peace, and often been castigated for not accepting more
bravely the new principle of nationalism. With regard to the former,
one may say that, although there was no world war, the century was
crowded with lesser, but important wars. Moreover, the absence of a
general European war cannot reasonably be attributed to the arrange-
ments made at Vienna and Paris in 1814-15, since many significant
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parts of those arrangements were soon changed. As to the second point,
these statesmen, presiding over an era of transition, were not yet in a
position to understand the new forces of democracy and nationalism.
In Congress Poland, where the principle of nationalism was applied to a
recognisable extent, the arrangements were soon overthrown.
These men had reasonably turned toward the more familiar principles
of the system of balance of power. Within that conceptual framework,
they performed a series of skilled operations, and made solid contri-
butions in ending the Napoleonic tyranny, granting Europe a breath-
ing spell and giving France sound frontiers. They also made a note-
worthy advance in the creation of the system of diplomacy by confer-
ence. On the other hand, their experiments were often useless, soon
discarded, or hazardous for the next generation. With the exception of
Tsar Alexander, their minds did not lift above the orthodox, there was
no stunning act of leadership, and no lasting, creative advance toward
the future. As the unfolding century soon showed, Europe had been
served only moderately well by these able and interesting men.
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CHAPTER XXV
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, 1815-30
an attempt has been made in Chapter I (pp. 7-1 1) to see how the
L\ general pattern of the European state system in 1830 differed
1 \from that of 1790. The shifting scenes of the war period are
described in Chapter IX, and the negotiations leading to the settlement
of 1815 in Chapter XXIV. Here it is intended to present in outline the
main issues that were implicit in the situation created by that settlement
or that came to a head in the years of relative tranquillity that followed
it. Most of these issues are touched upon in other chapters concerning
particular regions, but they need to be reviewed as elements in a
developing total situation as it presented itself to sovereigns, chanceries
and foreign ministers. Alexander I could not fix his gaze on Con-
stantinople without remembering Spain and Germany; neither Metter-
nich nor Canning could make a move about Latin America without
keeping an eye on the Aegean. Moreover, certain general problems
arise concerning the nature and conduct of international relations after
1815. At first, these are closely connected with the experiences, even
with the personalities, of the statesmen who made the settlement; all
of them, except for Talleyrand, survived in power for some years —
Castlereagh and Alexander I until their deaths in 1822 and 1825, and
Metternich for almost as many years after 1830 as before it.
But gradually the issues disentangle themselves from the leading
actors: by 1831-2, it would not have been difficult to predict the main
lines of policy that not only an Austrian but any British, Russian or
even French statesman would be most likely to follow. Palmerstonian
postures would on the whole prevail in London for a generation; the
Emperor Nicholas I had shown his hand at the Treaty of Adrianople
in 1829 and in Poland two years later; and the ministers of Louis
Philippe, though they might differ in their ideas of what was prudent,
were firmly committed (save for the irrepressible Thiers in 1840) to a
western alignment and to its corollary, an intention to avoid any major
clash with Britain, yet without renouncing some room for manoeuvre.
The Prussian government was still to eschew for a generation any really
determined initiative of a foreign policy independent of Vienna.
Leopold I in Belgium was to steer a shrewd course which gave him an
influence among princes much greater than his small power alone would
warrant. Secretary Adams and President Monroe had defined the
range and limits of American foreign policy in December 1823, though
the ‘doctrine’ which was extracted from the Message was to prove
extremely flexible over the years.
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Was there ever a ‘Congress System’ in action l 1 It may be argued
that there were merely three meetings of sovereigns and ministers, of
which the first (at Aix-la-Chapelle in the autumn of 1818) was not
much more than a pre-arranged ceremony for winding up the military
occupation of France, settling her debts and re-admitting her (with
some reservations) among the great Powers; while the second (at
Troppau and Laibach in the winter of 1820-1) and the third (at Verona
in the autumn of 1822) served rather to focus attention on the differences
between the Allies than to resolve them or to compose a system. After
that, there is not much until the Congress of Paris (1856) and the Con-
gress of Berlin (1878), both of which were peace-conferences after wars
which involved (or nearly involved) more than two Powers ; they were
not examples of any system for forestalling or adjusting difficulties in
time of peace. Between these two, the great changes of i860, 1866 and
1871 were made without any general congress. Even in the seven years
after 1815, no regular machinery for conferences or congresses was
devised. The final Article VI of the Quadruple Alliance of 20 November
1815 (Chapter XXIV, p. 663) no more created a working system than did
the modern expectation of periodical ‘summit’ meetings among Allies,
and its intention was subject to the same kind of deceptions. A further
meeting was already envisaged for the autumn of 1818, but the ‘fixed
periods’ of Article VI were never defined, and the first five articles
provided the context— the containment of France. The more effective
working ‘system’ for the next three years was the continuing conference
of the ambassadors of the four Powers in Paris.
Yet it is hard to deny that there was initially some conception of what
might become a system, or at least a method, of consultation among the
great Powers. The issues on the agenda in 1818 could probably have
been settled by diplomatic correspondence instead, if the principals had
not positively desired a conference; and they must have believed in
1820-2 that the method offered at least better prospects of agreement
on specific issues than would a less spectacular procedure. Alexander I
had not forgotten Czartoryski’s ill-defined proposals of 1804 to England
for a new system of international law, in which all states should accept
an obligation not to go to war without first invoking the mediation of a
third party for an inquiry into the causes of the dispute. Castlereagh,
for all his apparent insularity, had not forgotten his own association
with Pitt’s Instructions of 1805, much more severely practical in tone
1 Sir Charles Webster, The Foreign Policy of Castlereagh, 1815-22 (London, 1925), p. 56,
note, gave reasons for preferring the term ‘Conference’ after 1815, although contemporaries
used both terms in ways which make any clear distinction impossible. Continental historians
continue to use ‘Congress’ for meetings attended by sovereigns at this period, and this
usage has some convenience. This chapter’s debt is so apparent to that book, and to
H. W. V. Temperley, The Foreign Policy of Canning, 1822-27 (London, 1925), that few
references to them will be given.
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but touching upon the idea of ‘a general agreement and guarantee for
the mutual protection and security of different Powers and for the
re-establishing a general system of public law in Europe’. 1 Castlereagh
was now to abandon the suggestion of a general guarantee, but to make
great use of the rest. He believed in the virtue of personal discussion at
the highest level among men who had been associated in great events
and had at least one purpose in common, that of tranquillity for a
season after a generation of wars. The frictions and the superficial
frivolities of the Congress of Vienna did not entirely disillusion him.
The highest point of his confidence is seen in his letter from Aix-la-
Chapelle: \ . . it really appears to me to be a new discovery in the
European government, at once extinguishing the cobwebs with which
diplomacy obscures the horizon . . . and giving to the counsels of the
Great Powers the efficiency and almost the simplicity of a single State.’ 2
Yet much of this confidence rested precisely on his success in strictly
limiting the scope and purpose of the conference, against the Russian
desire to widen it indefinitely. Already, prompted by a cabinet sus-
picious of entanglements, he was sounding the warning, more emphatic-
ally expressed eighteen months later in a famous State Paper (p. 674,
below), that England would not be a party to a system of intervention
by the great Powers, unasked, in the internal affairs of other States.
Nevertheless, in 1818 he was criticising an abuse which could equally
arise without summit meetings and he was not denying in principle their
usefulness where men who understood each other could make effective
decisions. Alexander I could recapture at such a meeting some of that
intoxicating sense of 1814-15 that it was his duty to give a lead to
Europe. Metternich in turn was attracted to this method for several
reasons: because he might more easily adjust his immovable principles
to circumstances in personal negotiation than by despatches to perhaps
less supple ambassadors; because Alexander in such a setting might be
more amenable to reason than when he was feeling and acting as a
Russian on his home ground ; and because a meeting of sovereigns could
be an imposing demonstration of the conservative affiance, against danger
from France, danger from the ‘parties of movement’ — ‘Jacobins’,
‘sects’, ‘liberals’ — or even danger from imprudent rulers themselves.
The congresses did not provide a new kind of permanent international
machinery, nor even the only possible method of dealing with par-
ticular issues arising immediately out of the Vienna settlement. A
meeting of sovereigns was one method of maintaining and reasserting
this conservative alliance, and the desire to reassert it survived on the
Continent the use of this particular method. That is why, perhaps, the
name ‘Holy Alliance’ was attached in mockery by contemporary liberals
1 Webster, The Foreign Policy of Castlereagh, 1812-15 (London, 1931), p. 58.
* Webster, Castlereagh, 1815-22, p.153. Castlereagh to Liverpool, 20 October 1818.
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and by later historians to the general attitude of the conservative
monarchies. The document drafted for the tsar and signed on
26 September 1815 by himself, the Austrian emperor and the Prussian
king, was published in January 1816 and soon adopted by most govern-
ments. Not only monarchs were invited to adhere to it. Switzerland
did so; and the United States, where the press was at first inclined to
applaud its religious tone, eventually declined without any great show
of horror. Technically, it had little in common with the objects actually
pursued by the continental monarchies in foreign politics over the
following years. So far as it was not just a manifesto, it pointed towards
a ‘general Alliance’ — a wider and looser association among rulers than
the strictly limi ted alliance of the victorious great Powers — and it was
perhaps intended to give greater scope for Russia to make her influence
felt in the world. 1 Certainly, in the next few years the Russian govern-
ment tried consistently to introduce more States into the general
negotiations, 2 and even to bring the United States in as a counterweight
to the maritime power of England. In the war of 1812-14 between
England and the United States, the tsar had offered himself as a
mediator; Castlereagh managed to avoid that, but had to be content with
a negative result of this war (Treaty of Ghent, 28 December 1814), in
order to free his hands for the Congress at Vienna. Later, he was more
successful than Alexander in settling points of friction with the United
States, where opinion turned against the Russian disposition to interfere
in Spain and Spanish America and to stake claims on the Pacific coast
in the north-west. In questions such as these, interests rather than
principles dictated the policy of the Russian as of the other monarchies.
Yet, symbolically, there was also a ‘Holy Alliance’ between govern-
ments which sought a traditional and religious sanction against any
radical disturbance of the aristocratic or patrician social order.
The military power of Russia had been demonstrated in 1813-14,
and was not dismantled after the peace-settlement. The tsar’s faith and
pride in this power was not much shaken, and the fear which it inspired
in Europe was not much relieved, by some evidence of disaffection even
among officers in crack regiments, or by the inefficiency of a crude and
oppressive system of recruitment which an experiment with military
farm colonies did nothing to improve (Chapter XVIII, p. 518).
Russia’s campaigns of 1828-9 against Turkey were to show how difficult
1 The Russian draft included references to ‘the peoples’, which were amended, at
Mettemich’s instance, before signature. M. Bourquin, Histoire de la Sainte Alliance
(Geneva, 1954), pp. 134-5. H. G. Schenk, The aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars (London,
1947), PP- 37-8. G. de Bertier de Sauvigny well expounds the uses and abuses of the term
‘Holy Alliance’ in the English edition of his Metternich and his Times (London, 1962),
pp. 129-54.
* See, for example, the Correspondance dePozzo di Borgo . . . et . . . Nessebrode, 1814-18,
2 vols. (Paris, 1890), and the Russian memorandum of 8 October 1818. The relevant
passages are cited by M. Bourquin, op. cit., chs. 1 1-12.
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it was for her to mount and sustain a major striking force outside her
own borders; but in the first years after 1815, it seemed as if an incal-
culable force was at the disposal of one man. In contrast, Austria was
plainly in no condition to risk anything more than a punitive expedition
into Italy, certainly not a crisis in Turkey; Prussia had not rebuilt a
great military machine, and France would soon have been in difficulties
in 1823 if her intervention in Spain had not proved to be an almost
bloodless parade.
England’s maritime supremacy, along with her colonial possessions
and prospects, had been secured before the clinch came at Vienna in
1814-15, 1 and Castlereagh had succeeded in keeping them outside the
discussion of a European settlement. This enabled him to maintain
boldly that ‘there is no longer any object which the prince regent can
desire to acquire for the British Empire, either of possession or of
fame, beyond what Providence has already blessed it with; his only
desire is, and must be, to preserve the peace, which in concert with his
Allies he has won’. 2 Metternich basically acquiesced in this position,
but Alexander I could hardly do so sincerely. Russia had initiated the
system of armed neutrality against British sea power in 1780 and again
in 1800. In spite of her own weakness at sea, she might hope in time to
draw a reviving France and Spain, perhaps Holland and possibly even
the United States, into creating globally a balance of power like that
which England naturally wished to confine to the continent of Europe.
Such a design would involve Russia in theoretically contradictory
attitudes — supporting the differing regimes which she believed could
alone strengthen these other maritime powers for their role : absolutism
in Spain, constitutional monarchy in France and the Netherlands,
republican patriotism in the United States. The evidence for a clear and
consistently ‘realist’ policy of this kind is hardly sufficient, and Alexander
himself in 1818 rebuked Pozzo di Borgo, his ambassador in Paris, for
advocating a specific alignment with France and Spain against England
and Austria. But his notion of a ‘general alliance’ was more than a
vaguely religious sentiment; as interpreted by his minister Capodistrias,
it amounted to a shift in the balance of power onto a wider stage. It
may help to explain Alexander’s attempt to woo Holland by marrying
his sister to the Dutch crown prince (December 1815); his proposals for
disarmament (April 1815), designed to suggest that any pruning of
military powers on the continent should be matched by pruning of
British naval power; his transfer of some old warships to Spain —
1 Treaties with Portugal (19 February 1810) and Spain (5 July 1814) secured most-
favoured treatment for British trade in South America and excluded any revival of the old
Franco-Spanish pacte de famille. A Treaty with the Netherlands (13 August 1814) kept the
Cape and Ceylon for England.
1 Circular despatch to British missions abroad, 1 January 1816, cited in full by Webster,
op. cit., pp. 509-12.
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connected with a rumoured but abortive scheme of over-zealous
ambassadors to acquire Minorca for Russia (1816-17); his proposal for
collective, instead of isolated British, action against the Barbary pirates
(May 1818); and, in a larger context, the resentment of all the larger
maritime Powers against an extended use of the British navy’s claim
to rights of visit and search in suppressing the slave trade (1815-19).
With the unrest in Germany and Italy during 1819, and with the
electoral successes of the Left in France, Alexander became less inter-
ested in a ‘general alliance’ for redressing the balance of power and more
in an alliance solidaire against revolution. Of his two chief advisers in
foreign affairs since January 1816, Nesselrode was now helping
Metternich to move him in this direction (though without Alexander’s
mystical overtones); but the mobile influence of Capodistrias was only
gradually shaken by the events of 18 19-21. 1 Capodistrias had some
sympathy with the ‘parties of movement’, and wanted to make it easier
for them to become upholders of order like himself. He admired the
Alexander whom he had begun to serve ten years earlier. He found
Austrian influence everywhere stifling, and England obstructive to his
hopes in the Levant. He was probably not innocent of contacts with
trouble-makers for Austria. Metternich, touring Italy with his emperor
in the spring of 1819, was collecting evidence of intrigues by Russian
agents, which were denied by the tsar. Capodistrias had lately passed
through Italy on his way to Corfu, and had spoken of discontent
under Austrian rule in North Italy and under British rule in the
Ionian islands. In Germany, as in Italy, Metternich preferred if possible
to manage affairs alone or with Prussia, with moral support from his
other allies if he could get it, but without inviting their concerted help.
In this he had the full approval of the British Cabinet, which was
battling with deep unrest at home but unwilling to take part publicly
against it abroad. Here too, Metternich suspected confusion or duplicity
in Russian policy. Kotzebue was murdered by a German student for
being paid (it was said) by Russia to write against the German liberals;
Alexander condemned them as warmly as Metternich could desire, but
Metternich was jealous of his influence in some of the German courts, 8
and angry when Capodistrias bitterly criticised in the tsar’s name the
methods of repression adopted at Metternich’s instance by a conference
of nine German states at Carlsbad in August and three months later
by a larger conference at Vienna. 3
1 Already, on 7 September 1819, Metternich was begging Nesselrode privately to
counteract the anti-Austrian influence of his colleague. Webster, op. tit., p. 190.
* Alexander’s wife was sister to the Grand Duke of Baden (who resented certain decisions
taken to suit Austrian convenience) ; and his sister was the widow of the Grand Duke of
Oldenburg and now married to the King of Wurttemberg.
* Capodistrias’ ‘Apergu des idees de l’Empereur sur les affaires de l’Allemagne’, com-
municated to England 21 November 1819. Webster, op. tit., p. 193.
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Concerning Turkey, Alexander did not want to tie his hands for the
future, at least while their differences over the Treaty of Belgrade (May
1812) were still unsettled. He had taken pains to deny that his Holy
Alliance was in any way a threat to the sultan. 1 But Capodistrias, who
had the chief initiative in handling Balkan affairs, was not likely to damp
the fires there or to miss any opportunity of promoting, at least by
diplomacy, a new deal for the Greeks in particular (Chapter XIX,
p. 535). In this region, the tsar would always find the Habsburg
monarchy obstructive where its frontiers marched with Turkey in
Europe, while British strategical and commercial interests in the
Levant, and in Persia too, would usually, though not quite always,
obstruct Russian means of pressure on the sultan on that side. The
evidence suggests that the events of 1821 presented the Russian govern-
ment with a situation which it neither planned nor foresaw, nor yet had
done much to prevent by any sharp rebukes to some over-zealous agents.
Although Metternich hoped to avoid a public conference about
Germany or Italy, he did want moral support from his allies, and pressed
during the summer of 1819 for a regular ‘point of moral contact’
among the ambassadors — if not in London, then perhaps in Vienna (as
he doubtless hoped). The British Cabinet rejected all such precautionary
measures in advance of any ‘overt acts’ involving its treaty obligations.
Overt acts were soon to show how variously obligations might be
interpreted. In Spain, a mutiny of unpaid troops at Cadiz on 1 January
1820 gave the partisans of the Constitution of 1812 the opportunity to
proclaim it by seizing power in Madrid in March (Chapter XVI, pp. 448-
450). Russia wanted allied intervention (in Capodistrias’ view, with the
object of imposing a moderate charter on king and insurgents alike);
France was inclined to play a leading role, some hoped with the same
object and in any case so as to show herself independent of England;
Prussia leaned to the Russian suggestion ; but Metternich thought that
England’s reaction would be much more decisive than the tsar’s, and
showed great caution. This was the situation that produced the British
Cabinet’s State Paper of 5 May 1820, 2 which pointedly rejected col-
lective intervention as not called for by any direct military danger and
as likely to aggravate Spanish feelings. The Alliance was ‘never in-
tended as a union for the government of the world or for the super-
intendence of the internal affairs of other States. . . . No country having
a representative system of Government could act upon [such a general
principle]. ... We shall be found in our place when actual danger
menaces the system of Europe: but this country cannot and will not
1 Circular to the other four Powers, 30 March 1816, cited by J. H. Pirenne, Histoire de la
Sainte Alliance, 2 vols. (Neuchatel, 1945), vol. n, pp. 87-8.
* Printed in full in the Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy (Cambridge, 1923),
vol. n, App. A, pp. 622-33.
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act upon abstract and speculative principles of precaution. The
Alliance which exists had no such purpose in view in its original
formation’.
The immediate effect of this paper was decisive. France acquiesced,
and Metternich swallowed its general doctrine for the sake of isolating
Russia in this instance. It was not in essence a novel doctrine, and the
sharper edge now given to its expression may be partly due to England’s
special dislike of interference by other Powers in the Peninsula; but the
argument that differing forms of government must affect foreign policies
was here first clearly stated. Three years later, Canning (who may have
had a hand with the rest of the Cabinet in shaping it) used it, by pub-
lishing extracts in a different situation and a wider context, in order to
strike an attitude against the ‘Holy Alliance’. For in the interval other
events had made the breach open.
In Portugal, while King John VI was still putting off his return from
Brazil, more than twelve years since his flight from the French, a
revolutionary movement at Oporto in August 1820 was completed at
Lisbon early in October (Chapter XVI, pp. 451-2). Here, Castlereagh’s
warnings were directed rather against the king’s hopes of collective
intervention than against any real prospect of it; moreover, he told first
the monarchists and then the victorious liberals in turn that they could
not expect a renewal of England’s guarantee of her old ally against either
Spain or the Alliance as a means of propping up any extreme party in
Portugal. On King John’s return in the summer of 1821, he had to sub-
mit to the new Cortes, and a year later his son Dom Pedro made
himself a completely independent ruler in Brazil (15 August 1822).
Thus the revolutions in Portugal and Brazil were insulated for the
moment from any interference by the Alliance.
Meanwhile, if Metternich’ s compliance over Spain was his reward
to England for giving Austria no trouble over Germany, Metternich
in turn was rewarded by Castlereagh’s positive support for Austria in
suppressing revolt in Naples and (for a time) in leaving the sultan free
to do so in Greece if he could. The problem was a different one in each
of these four regions; in each of them, the reactions of England and
Austria were divergent but had this in common — fear of Russian
intervention. Unlike the mutiny at Cadiz, the rising in Naples just six
months later (July 1820) was unexpected, for there had been no such
violent reaction under the restored Bourbon there as in Spain, and the
country had appeared to be settling down better than any other part
of Italy (Chapter XV, pp. 429-30). But a movement which began
among Muratist officers, who resented serving under an Austrian com-
mander, was captured by the Carbonari who forced the king to swear
allegiance to the Spanish Constitution of 1812. As usual, the Sicilians
in turn rose against rule from Naples, and were bloodily put down. For
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Metternich, if Spain was no more than a bad example, Naples was a
direct threat to Austrian control in Italy. And on this ground Castle-
reagh positively encouraged hi m to step in alone, both forestalling any
Russian move for collective intervention and saving England from the
embarrassment of having to stand aside from it in accordance with the
principles lately announced in relation to Spain. But Metternich was
soon faced by Russian insistence, with some French support, on a
formal conference of all the Allies which would also consider the
revolutionary problem as a whole. He could not afford, as in Spain,
to do nothing, nor could he break with Russia by acting alone. After
manoeuvring for a compromise procedure which might satisfy both
Russia and England, he had to agree to a conference of sovereigns to
which England sent her ambassador at Vienna as a mere observer,
without plenipotentiary powers and with instructions to dissent from
any collective pronouncements. The French position was ambiguous
but eventually nearer to that of England.
Thus the conference which opened at Troppau on 23 October 1820
was not what Metternich had desired, and it was a blow to Castlereagh’s
hopes, still not quite extinct, of preserving the formal unity of the
Alliance. It became a duel for the tsar’s mind between Capodistrias,
who hoped (as in Spain) to impose a moderate charter on both parties
in Naples, and Metternich who found this remedy worse than the
disease. In order to circumvent Capodistrias’ idea of intervention as a
kind of mediation between a sovereign and his subjects, Metternich
had to play on Alexander’s notion of a religious crusade against the
revolutionary spirit. The resulting ‘preliminary protocol’ (19 November)
asserted that States which had undergone revolutionary changes,
menacing to other States, would remain excluded from the Euro-
pean Alliance until legal order and stability was assured; that the
Allied Powers would refuse recognition to changes brought about by
illegal methods; and that, if immediate danger to a neighbour were
threatened, they would proceed if necessary from friendly representa-
tions to coercive measures in order to bring the offender back into the
bosom of the Alliance. Metternich had to agree that Austrian inter-
vention in Naples should be in the name of the Alliance and that the
king should be invited to meet an adjourned conference at Laibach
in the new year; but there was no mention of mediation, and in the
upshot the Carbonari played into Metternich’s hands by rejecting any
compromise and forcing the king, before he sailed, to swear to the
impractical Constitution of 1812. Although Russia, Austria and Prussia
had already signed this protocol, they agreed, on the British observer’s
protest, to treat it as no more than a proposal to the other two; but,
before Castlereagh’s blunt rejection of it reached Troppau, they
followed it up with a confidential circular to their diplomatic representa-
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tives (8 December), which reported their decisions as to Naples and
repeated many of the unacceptable doctrines as to the nature of the
Alliance as if they had been agreed by all five Powers. It also alluded
to Spain and Portugal. The gist of this circular was soon known in
other capitals and leaked into the Morning Chronicle on 15 January
1821. The British Cabinet, under heavy fire at home, had already decided
to make its protest public; its answering circular (19 January), was laid
before Parliament with supporting documents, and debated in February.
Its approval of an Austrian right to intervene in Naples, and its re-
assertion of the full harmony and vigour of the Alliance ‘upon all
points really embraced by Treaty’, were ridiculed by the opposition;
but its public dissent from the methods of the three courts not only
committed British policy for the future but also made a profound and
lasting impression abroad.
In the conferences resumed at Laibach on 12 January 1821, the three
courts kept on trying to reassert ‘the solidarity of the Allied Powers’.
With the French they had some success, but the British observer refused
to let England’s dissent be concealed from the Neapolitans. Before
reaching Laibach, the king had repudiated his oath to the Constitution
of 1812 and, when an Austrian army restored him to Naples on
24 March, he showed none of the moderation, which Metternich him-
self now advised, either in Naples or in Sicily. Yet Castlereagh was as
much opposed as Metternich to any mediation. His disapproval of
collective intervention as a method was genuine, and was to outlast the
special need to placate a menacing opposition at home; but this was
compatible with relief at the result of intervention. He told Metternich
that in Naples ‘you would have done better to have acted first and
talked afterwards’. He was equally opposed to mediation in Piedmont
when an unexpected insurrection at Turin on 10 March led to the
resignation of King Victor Emmanuel in favour of his brother (Chapter
XV, pp. 433-4). Here Castlereagh was most afraid of French inter-
vention, and made no objection when Austrian troops marched in to
help the new king restore order. Yet he was disturbed that the tsar
still wanted to intervene, or get France to intervene, in Spain, and he
could not pass over the final declarations of the sovereigns at Laibach
(12 May) which repeated the doctrines of Troppau and announced a
further conference next year to report progress in Naples and Piedmont.
In principle, the three Powers had placed Spain and Portugal under the
ban, although their representatives in Madrid were not for the moment
withdrawn. In June Castlereagh reasserted in Parliament the principles
of his Circular of 19 January, but made no further direct protest.
Meanwhile, the news of Hypsilantes’ adventure in the Principalities
and then of the Greek insurrection in the Peloponnese (Chapter XEX,
pp. 538-9, 547) reached Laibach before the conference ended.
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Capodistrias had the painful duty of drafting the tsar’s public dis-
avowal of Russian support for Hypsilantes, but his position was not
yet hopeless. Alexander had already at Troppau been talking of the
Alliance as the only bulwark against the ‘satanic genius’ of revolution,
which was working everywhere by ‘ occult methods’ to set up the ‘ reign
of evil’. On his return to Russia in June 1821, he ascribed to the Paris
Liberals the revolutions in Spain, Portugal and Italy, and now the
troubles in European Turkey too, which would have no support from
him in spite of past history and popular opinion. He would be faithful
to his treaties with the sultan, and to the Alliance. Yet he could hardly
do less than protest about the sultan’s indiscriminate reprisals against
the Greeks in Constantinople, and other measures held to be violations
of treaty rights. His ambassador Stroganov, who had already sus-
pended diplomatic intercourse early in June, executed with gusto the
instructions (28 June, drafted by Capodistrias), which reached him in
July, to demand satisfaction within eight days: already on board a
Russian frigate for personal safety, he sailed away on 10 August, as
soon as winds allowed.
For the next two years, Metternich concentrated on preventing war
by keeping the Greek question separate from Russo-Turkish disputes
about treaty rights, preaching to the sultan moderation on the former
and strict execution of the latter. In this he was ably seconded by the
British ambassador Lord Strangford, whose real services were obscured,
in the eyes of Philhellenes, by his extreme Turcophil sentiments.
Castlereagh had to rebuke him more than once, but his own view differed
from Metternich’s only in two ways. First, he was more sceptical about
‘conjoint representations upon the Ottoman ministry: they have
invariably failed of producing a beneficial effect. The Porte has always
looked upon the European Alliance as a league which they viewed
with religious as well as political distrust’. Secondly, England had fewer
obligations than Austria to Russia, and was less willing even to discuss
the possible consequences of a Russo-Turkish war upon the future of
Turkey in Europe. With these differences of approach, Castlereagh’s
meeting with Metternich at Hanover in October 1821 (during a visit
with his king) nevertheless produced a close agreement on a parallel
but not identical policy towards both tsar and sultan, and above all on
eliminating the influence of Capodistrias, whose connection with the
Ionian Islands was a special cause of anxiety to the British high com-
missioner there. 1 No Russian campaign could begin before the spring;
intense diplomatic activity filled the interval until the retirement of
1 Yet a private letter of Joseph Planta to Stratford Canning (8 August 1821), printed in
Webster, op. cit., pp. 582-4, shows that a personal opinion, even inside the Foreign Office,
could already cheerfully contemplate a Russian victory and an independent Greek kingdom
under Capodistrias, with the Ionian islands thrown in.
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Capodistrias to Switzerland (July 1822) marked the triumph of the
tsar’s principles over his sentiments. Or so it seemed — but this and other
issues were adjourned to the forthcoming conference. Before he died
Castlereagh him self could write of ‘the progress made by the Greeks
towards the formation of a government’, and look ahead to their
recognition as belligerents and even possibly to ‘the creation of a
qualified Greek government’, but without any British guarantee.
Having been persuaded by his allies not to force the issue in the east,
because of mounting dangers in the west, Alexander now embarrassed
them by proposing collective armed intervention in Spain on behalf of
the king. His offer to send a Russian contingent at once was not taken
seriously, but in France a powerful group at court and in the cabinet
took the opportunity to lay plans for a French intervention, either in
the name of the Alliance or independently. Arms and supplies were
already going to the counter-revolutionary parties in Spain, and a
French cordon sanitaire, spread along the frontier by the summer of
1822, became an ‘army of observation’ in the autumn. This was less
alarming for Austria than the Russian plan, but much more alarming
for England because the danger was more real. Thus the Spanish
problem, dormant for two years, came to the fore again — just when
the question of South American independence was also becoming
critical.
The virtual or complete independence of most of South America was
already before 1822 generally expected outside Spain (Chapter XXIII).
What mattered to the other courts of Europe was that any arrange-
ment should not appear to be a victory for revolution, a humiliation for
kings and a bad example to the world. Further, in 1818 Alexander had
still been hoping to keep for Spain enough strength to be reckoned in
the scales, along with France, against the sea power of England. What
mattered to France was the hope of reviving in some way the old
Bourbon ‘family compact’ with Spain. What mattered to England was:
first that South American ports should be open to all comers, without
special privileges for England or any other State, but allowing, if need
be, a ‘fair preference’ to Spain itself; and secondly that no force or
threat of force should be used in any mediation between Spain and her
former colonies. These two conditions were among those laid down by
the British Cabinet in May 1812 and again in July 1817. Neither was
accepted by the Spanish government before or after the revolution of
1820 in Spain itself. For this reason no progress was made in the con-
gresses of 1818 or 1820-1. For the rest, both Castlereagh and Canning
held that new republics would be both less congenial to English tradi-
tions and also less stable than would new monarchies if such could be
set up (as in Brazil). Castlereagh would have preferred Spanish
princes, but unwelcome evidence of French designs to promote a
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French Bourbon led him to tell the Colombian agent in London (July
1820) that England would recognise any native monarchy.
Neither Castlereagh nor Canning wanted all the credit for recognition
of the new nations to go to the United States. Republicans in and out of
Congress had long been calling for open recognition; they were incensed
by the proceedings of the Alliance in Europe and lately by a Russian
Ukase (decree) of 28 September 1821, closing to foreign ships the whole
Pacific coast down to 51 0 (almost to Vancouver). Secretary Adams
moved cautiously; but in December 1821 the President foreshadowed
individual recognition, in May 1822 he was authorised by Congress to
send missions at his discretion, and in June he formally received a
Colombian representative. At the same time, the British Navigation
Acts were being modified so as to admit foreign ships, including those of
South America. After a fruitless overture to France and warnings to
Spain and the other Powers in May, Castlereagh framed his own
instructions (July) for the coming congress, distinguishing three stages
in relation to territories where the struggle was already over: com-
mercial recognition de facto, already operative ; the sending of diplomatic
agents; and finally de jure recognition which would deny the rights of the
former sovereign. Later practice was hardly to support these fine dis-
tinctions, at any rate between the second and third stages, but Castlereagh
saw the situation as still very fluid. England would try to move in step
with her allies, even with a Spain brought to see reason, but would retain
‘an independent discretion to act according to circumstances’.
Castlereagh did not decide until the end of July to go himself to the
congress, now to be held at Verona, not at Vienna as first planned.
On 12 August 1822 he died by his own hand. Five weeks passed before
George Canning won the succession; he was indispensable, but feared by
enemies at court and among Tory colleagues who had felt the lash of his
tongue and distrusted his less than aristocratic origin, his ambition and
his versatile genius. Among these was the Duke of Wellington, who
had already been named to take Castlereagh’s place at Verona. He left
a day or two after Canning’s appointment, with unchanged instructions.
Wellington was a loyal public servant, and continuity was preserved;
but England’s key position in the great issues affected by naval and
commercial power made even a change of style at the Foreign Office a
European event. Where Castlereagh made discreet signals, Canning
waved a flag — in conversation, in despatches, in Parliament and in
public speeches. In all these he far outshone Castlereagh: his political
experience was not inferior; in foreign affairs he was equally well
informed, but he lacked the personal intimacies born of common
experiences. He did not profess or desire to be a European in that
sense: ‘For Alliance, read England, and you have the clue to my
policy’; ‘Every country for itself and God for us all’ (1823).
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Castlereagh had expected that Turkey and Spanish America would
be more pressing questions at Verona than Spain or Italy, but the
failure of a Spanish royalist coup in July, and the deter min ation of
France to assert herself in Spain, made this issue overshadow all the
rest. In a supplementary instruction (27 September), Canning declared
that, ‘come what may’, England would not be a party to any collective
intervention in Spain. In reply to Montmorency’s questions, only
Russia offered France full support. Austria and Prussia agreed to with-
draw their ambassadors from Spain if France should do so, and to give
France moral support if war broke out between the two ; but in effect
they evaded any promise of material help. Finally, all three Powers
limited the casus foederis to armed attack by Spain on France, direct
provocation through propaganda by Spanish agents in France, or violent
treatment of the king or his family and their rights of succession. Ten
days before he left Verona on 30 November, Wellington dissociated
England from these proceedings and said that her minister at Madrid
(whose recent posting there was itself an offence to the three courts)
would confine himself to ‘allaying the ferment which they must
occasion’. The result was a diplomatic defeat for Canning. The
French government announced its intention (25 December) to act alone
and disavowed Montmorency’s commitment to the Alliance. The
impetuous Chateaubriand, now foreign minister, ignored both the Left’s
prophecies of mutiny or military disaster, and also the disapproval of
England. In reply to the French king’s speech from the throne (28 January
i823),CanningthreatenedFranceinParliament(i 1 February), announced
an increase in the fleet and suspended the embargo on sending arms to
Spain and Spanish America. But by the end of March the French knew
that the British Cabinet did not mean war unless France should attack
Portugal or help Spain to recover her colonies. An army of 100,000
men marched to Madrid and finally to Cadiz, and over-turned the
revolution almost without bloodshed (April to September 1823). But,
although French troops remained in Spain for five years, France was
powerless to check the violence of the king’s revenge or (as some
had hoped) to impose a charter on the French pattern (Chapter XVI,
pp. 450-1).
Canning’s defiant reaction to this set-back was also the measure of his
bounding popularity at home, in spite or because of the known hostility
of some of his colleagues and of the king himself. His scornful rejection
of the European Alliance — ‘Areopagus and all that’ — was just what
many Englishmen wanted to hear. But procedure by means of ‘ summit’
conferences had been killed as much by the waywardness of Alexander
and the self-assertion of Chateaubriand as by the gradual progress of
England, as it were, from Castlereagh’s 'de facto' dissent from the
methods of the Alliance to Canning’s ‘ de jure' repudiation of its
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principles. Moreover, for the next few years the ‘parties of movement'
seemed to be under control in the heart of Europe. Canning was tc
seek his revenge in fields where there was in any case no hope oi
an alliance solidaire: first in America and Portugal, and then in the
Levant.
Canning’s first answer to the rumours of French designs in Spanish
America was to sound the United States for a joint disclaimer of anj
territorial ambitions there themselves and a joint warning against those
of any other Power (August-September 1 823). The American Minister.
Richard Rush, welcomed the idea, but on condition that England would
first recognise officially the already independent colonies — a condition
which American opinion would demand, but one which Canning
neither would nor could yet fulfil, for he still hesitated to despair of a
voluntary settlement between Spain and her colonies and he could nol
in any case have carried King and Cabinet for immediate recognition
Next, in the week before news of the fall of Cadiz reached London
(3-9 October), Canning pressed the French ambassador, Polignac, into
disclaiming any French desire for territory or exclusive advantages, 01
for any use of force against the colonies. Although Polignac still
looked to another conference of the Allies for a settlement, he did nol
personally reject Canning’s suggestion that the United States ought tc
be consulted. 1 These conversations were known to the Allies in
November, but not to Secretary Adams when he was persuading
President Monroe to make a bold move.
Adams saw that England could and would prevent Allied interference,
and that it would be safe for the president to make independently a far-
reaching declaration of policy to his own people. In substance, the
Message of 2 December 1823 stated that, since the policy of the Republic
was to accept as legitimate all de facto governments in Europe and nol
to interfere in their affairs, so too it would not interfere with existing
European colonies or dependencies in America but would not allow
any European Power to impose on independent governments, recog-
nised by the United States, the essentially different political system of the
Allied Powers — a system which ‘our southern brethren’, if left to
themselves, would surely not adopt. This seemed to make republics
the norm, if not the rule, for the American continent ; but the sting was
in the passage which referred to the Russian Ukase of 1821 and went
on to rule out future colonisation by any European Powers (Chapter
XXII, pp. 591-2 and Chapter XXIII, pp. 637-8). This was a bold
claim indeed, at a time when effective occupation by the Republic hardly
extended beyond the Mississippi and its frontier with Canada had nol
been agreed beyond the Rockies. Canning was bound to question this
claim, and he did not like the assumption that all independent states in
1 Full text published by Temperley, The Foreign Policy of Canning, pp. 114-18.
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America ought to be republics any better than the opposite assumption
of the Allied monarchs for Europe ; but he welcomed the Message as a
death-blow to the Alliance. Though cautious in Parliament, he wrote
privately: ‘The congress was broken in all its limbs before, but the
President’s speech gives it the coup de grace’. Alexander’s Ukase had
made nonsense of his supposed desire to use the United States for
balancing the power of Britain.
Throughout 1824, Canning refused to take part in the continuing
conferences of the other Powers. In March he published his formal
refusal of 30 January, along with his record of the conversations with
Polignac. When Spain — too late — had opened her colonial trade (as
she still saw it) to foreign shipping (February), he did indeed make one
more fruitless effort to negotiate peaceful separation, by the doubtful
expedient of offering a British guarantee of Cuba to Spain (April).
But in July he informed Mettemich that the influence of the Continental
Powers ceased with the bounds of Europe — a doctrine implicit in
British policy since 1814 but now made painfully explicit. In the same
month he persuaded the Cabinet to recommend a commercial treaty
with Buenos Aires. But he postponed any decisive action while he was
collecting information in the former Spanish colonies and building up
support at home against determined efforts to discredit him. Finally,
after a sharp struggle, the king’s speech (7 February 1825) made public
the decision, already communicated to Spain at the end of December,
to give de facto diplomatic recognition to Buenos Aires (Argentina),
Mexico and Colombia by means of commercial treaties. 1
Adams and Canning each understood the sentiments of his own
people, but it must be doubtful whether Adams understood those of
his ‘southern brethren’ any better than Canning did. The two men were
rivals for the esteem of the former colonies. Both repudiated the ‘Holy
Alliance’ of European monarchs; but, where the Message appealed to
something like a ‘Holy Alliance’ of republican Americans of North
and South alike. Canning’s appeal was to national interest and senti-
ment at home, and among Latin Americans to their knowledge that
England had the power, as well as the motive, to protect them from
interference by the Alliance— or even by the North itself. The actual
danger of interference was probably exaggerated: in the Message, by
the prominence given to the Russian Ukase of 1821; by Canning, in
constantly harping upon French designs. But the danger was not
imaginary. The moral effect of Monroe’s earlier recognition and his
Message was in the next few years overshadowed by the practical
effectiveness of Canning’s diplomacy and British sea power. More-
1 Without any treaties, British trade with South America had increased tenfold in the past
ten years, but treaties were badly needed to protect and regularise it. British exports to
the South were now hardly less than to the North.
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over, the United States had not, like England, distinctly disclaimed any
desire to acquire more territory; although each suspected the other of an
interest in Cuba, Canning had offered to guarantee Cuba to Spain.
The Panama Congress in 1826 was a fiasco; only four of the new States
were represented, and Bolivar’s dream of a federal union was shattered;
yet at that time the prestige of Britain in South America seemed to be
greater than that of the United States. Canning feared an ideological
split between a monarchical continent on one side of the Atlantic and a
republican continent on the other. He hoped that Britain might pro-
vide a bridge between them. His fear and his hope were both intelligible,
even if both eventually faded.
The independence of Brazil, with a monarch of the Portuguese
dynasty, was less offensive to the courts of Europe, and Canning was
anxious to legitimise it with the consent of Portugal. British diplomacy
played the chief part in arranging the treaty ratified on 20 November
1825, whereby King John in Lisbon recognised Brazil as an inde-
pendent empire under his son Dom Pedro. The European Alliance
could not object, but soon it suffered a new blow, which Canning
clinched at the very moment that he was entering into a separate
understanding with Russia about Greece. On the death of King
John in Lisbon (March 1826), Dom Pedro renounced his claim to
the throne in favour of his infant daughter Maria, and bestowed on
Portugal a constitution made in Rio (29 April). Though it was brought
to Lisbon by the British minister in Rio, it was not his work. Canning
did not much like it, but he supported General Saldanha (a grandson of
Pombal) in forcing the regency to take the oath to it, and answered
Allied warnings against Portuguese infection of Spain by even more
decisive warnings against Spanish interference in Portugal. With the
defection of Russia and the embarrassment of France, Mettemich
could not resist Canning’s triumphant argument for respecting a
constitution voluntarily granted by a legitimate monarch. Dom
Miguel in Vienna half-heartedly obeyed his elder brother Dom Pedro’s
order from Brazil to swear to the constitution and promise to marry his
niece, the infant queen. Canning ensured that this news reached Lisbon
just in time to be announced in the regent’s opening speech to the new
Cortes (30 October). But Portuguese officers, enemies of the new
regime and partisans of Dom Miguel’s real views, led a force of deserters
into Spain, where they were soon being organised under the eyes of the
Spanish government (and of the French army still in Spain) for a counter-
revolution in Portugal. As soon as Canning could claim that overt
acts justified invoking the British treaty guarantee of Portugal against
Spain, he announced the despatch of a naval force to the Tagus. In a
speech so rhetorical as to risk missing fire, he won at the end a re-
sounding ovation in the Commons with his famous boast: ‘I look at the
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Indies, and I call in the New World to redress the balance of the
Old.’ 1
The timing of Canning’s policy in the Mediterranean was closely
linked with his Atlantic diplomacy, and it was an even bolder policy
because he held fewer trump cards and success was still uncertain when
he died. For three years he held aloof from the Greek affair. Capodistrias
had been removed from power before the Congress at Verona, and a
Greek deputation had not been allowed to come near it. Canning’s
recognition of the Greeks as belligerents in March 1823 did little more
than endorse an expedient already in use for protecting commerce in a
region where the Turks had no effective command of the sea. The
Austrian and British ambassadors at Constantinople succeeded for the
moment in isolating the Russo-Turkish disputes from the Greek
question; after meeting Metternich at Czernowitz in October, Alexander
agreed to renew relations with Turkey for commercial purposes, and to
do nothing about Greece without consulting all his Allies. He invited
them to a conference at St Petersburg in the spring to discuss his
promised Memoire about Greece. This Memoire (January 1824) pro-
posed dividing Greece into three principalities, with a status like those
on the Danube: the Turks would have an annual tribute and garrisons
in specified fortresses. To the Allies, this plan seemed a mere device for
ensuring the predominance of Russia; to the Greeks it offered autonomy
over a much larger area than they could hope to conquer, but their
Constitution of 1822 committed them to nothing less than independence.
When the plan leaked into a Paris newspaper at the end of May, it was
already dead.
Canning’s refusal, here as elsewhere, to take part in a conference was
here based partly on the argument, already used by Castlereagh, that
the Turks would pay no attention to collective pressure not backed by
force, and partly on his general antipathy to Metternich, which was
fully reciprocated. Yet there were already signs that British neutrality
was becoming benevolent towards the Greeks. Both Greek hopes and
Metternich’s suspicions were indeed unfounded when, early in 1823, a
British naval officer had conversations with some Greek leaders, for
these were initiated by the high commissioner of the Ionian Islands, no
lover of the Greeks, with the object of finding out on what terms they
would submit; moreover, in Turkey, unlike South America, British
merchants were mostly hostile to the insurgents. But in April Canning
rebuked the Levant Company for their pro-Turkish idea of neutrality;
in August he wrote (privately, it is true) that, if some vent must be
1 The speech, as reported next day by the Star (in close touch with Canning’s friends), is
given by Temperley, op. cit., pp. 579-85, alongside the corrected version printed in
Canning’s Speeches (London, 1836), where a more extravagant phrase is used: ‘I called the
New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old’ (my italics).
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found for the Russian army, he would rather it were in Turkey than in
Spain; and in January 1824 Sir John Bowring, the Benthamite organiser
of the philhellene Greek Committee in London, was favourably
impressed by an interview with him. 1 Moreover, the sultan could not
understand how the City of London could vote money for Greece, or
how Lord Byron, an English peer, could come to spend it there — and
his own life too — if the government really felt the friendship which it
still professed for Turkey.
The conferences at St Petersburg withered in June 1824. A second
series (February to June 1825) made no better progress; Metternich’s
sudden proposal to abandon mediation and threaten the Turks instead
with eventual recognition of Greek independence ‘as a measure of fact
and necessity’ was intended only to show what in the last resort he
would prefer rather than the Russian plan, and to force the sultan
meanwhile either to offer terms himself or else subdue the Greeks
quickly. On the day that these conferences opened (24 February),
Muha mm ad Ali’s son Ibrahim landed in the Peloponnese the first
division of his army of 10,000 Egyptians, and it seemed that the Greeks
could not resist much longer. The isolation of Britain from these con-
ferences did not preclude her from forcible resistance, if need be, to
Russian conquests, nor even from British intervention alone on behalf
of the Greeks. The last was an attractive notion, and perhaps not
impracticable ; but the Cabinet would never have agreed to it at this stage,
and the Greeks had repudiated any compromise.
A different possibility, that of intervention along with Russia but not
with the Alliance, had perhaps been foreshadowed two years earlier
when Canning suggested (again privately) that, after the tsar should have
renewed full diplomatic relations with Turkey, ‘I will talk Greek with
him if he pleases.’ 2 Now, it seemed to be the only way out. Alexander
ceased in August 1825 to discuss the question with his allies. Of
Canning’s two conditions for ‘talking Greek with him’ — a Russian
ambassador in Constantinople and a disavowal of force — the first was
not yet fulfilled and the second never would be; but conditions had
changed, for the sultan had brought in the Egyptians to subdue the
revolt, and a strong Anglophil party in Greece had lately sent delegates
to London, bearing an appeal for British protection, called an ‘Act
of Submission’. Canning could only tell them that ‘there might be a
point in the contest when Great Britain would promote a fair and safe
compromise’, and he issued a new proclamation of neutrality (29-30
September). But early in October Mme de Lieven arrived from St
Petersburg, ‘a living despatch’ bringing ‘a little note’ from Alexander.
1 Canning to Bagot, 20 August 1823. Bowring’s interview, to January 1824. Details in
C. W. Crawley, The Question of Greek Independence (Cambridge, 1930), pp. 30, 35.
8 To Bagot, 20 August 1823. Crawley, op. cit., p. 30.
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Canning sent Strangford to Russia with instructions (14 October) to
‘meet confidence with confidence’; on the 25th Lieven told him that
Ibrahim’s ‘plan for disposing of his conquest is ... to remove the whole
Greek population, carrying them off into slavery in Egypt or elsewhere,
and to repeople the country with Egyptians and others of the Mahometan
religion’.
Canning would still have preferred to intervene alone, and had just
sent his cousin Stratford Canning to Constantinople with instructions
to contact the Greek leaders on his way there. But the evidence that
Alexander was preparing for war before his death on 1 December, the
likelihood that his successor would consult Russian interests alone, and
the desperate state of the Greeks — all these suggested that there was no
time to lose. Wellington was sent to St Petersburg to congratulate the
new tsar on his accession and to follow up the new policy. The evidence
for Ibrahim’s plan was shadowy, but Canning’s willingness to use it as
a lever on opinion at home was not unlike his emphasis earlier on
French designs in South America and, a little later, on Spanish threats
to Portugal. The Anglo-Russian Protocol of 4 April 1826 was grounded
not on Ibrahim’s plan but on the Greek invitation to England to
mediate, forecast by Stratford Canning in January but not confirmed
until the end of April. The Protocol gave no hint of the use of force
by England, but it contained by implication a threat of it by Russia
— an implication which Wellington hardly perceived. Early in May,
its text was published in The Times, and was as much welcomed by
friends of Greece as it had already been condemned by Mettemich.
Canning himself criticised it as ‘not very artistically drawn’, and was in
any case obliged by Cabinet doubts to move very cautiously. His
object was ‘to save Greece by the agency of the Russian name upon
the fears of Turkey, without a war’. But he found Russia reverting to
the Greek question as soon as she had settled by threat of war her other
disputes with Turkey, at Akkerman (October 1826). To escape from
the charge of being bound hand and foot to Russia, he spent six weeks in
Paris in the autumn and persuaded the Bourbon government to take the
initiative by producing the first draft (January 1827) of a tripartite
Treaty.
In February, Lord Liverpool’s illness and retirement caused a Cabinet
crisis. Little more could be done until May, a month after Canning had
formed a coalition ministry with some of the Whigs, on the resignation
of Wellington and some other Tories. The Treaty of London (6 July
1827), as finally drafted after a tussle between Russian eagerness and
French delays, omitted any direct threat to withdraw the ambassadors
and any promise by England to guarantee the settlement ; but it included
a secret additional article, pledging the three Powers, if the proposed
armistice were not accepted within a month (later reduced to a
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fortnight), to accredit consuls to the Greeks and to prevent any further
collision between the combatants, but without themselves taking any
part in the hostilities. The instructions sent to the ambassadors and the
admirals a week later did little to elucidate the vagueness of this article;
but the interpretation received by Admiral Codrington from Stratford
Canning left no doubt in his mind that a settlement was to be imposed
on the Turks, by force if necessary, and he found the duty congenial. The
ambassadors’ final instructions to the admirals prescribed a ‘pacific
blockade’ covering the Peloponnese, part of northern Greece and the
‘contiguous’ islands, also Samos and (at first) Crete. Meanwhile the
unauthorised publication of the whole treaty in The Times of 12 July
convinced public opinion that Greece was saved.
Canning’s last move was an attempt to remove a ground for war by
persuading Muhammad Ali independently to withdraw the Egyptian
fleet and army; but he died on 8 August before it had failed. The
Greeks accepted the armistice, but did not observe it at sea; the Egyptian
and Turkish commanders, who were awaiting orders from Con-
stantinople, retaliated by ravages on land, and by trying in vain to
break the blockade of the bay of Navarino where their ships were
assembled. The French admiral wanted to avoid any clash with the
Egyptian fleet, in which a number of his countrymen were serving, but
a conference with Ibrahim was indecisive. The Russian squadron, which
had left Cronstadt in June, was the last to arrive on the scene, but its
commander told Codrington that in his opinion the tsar had already
declared war. Codrington, as the senior admiral, made the dispositions
for the three squadrons to enter the bay; they were to be ready for
battle but not to fire the first shot. His personal view was simple:
‘There His Highness’s fleet will terminate its hostile career’. The
‘battle’ which followed on 20 October destroyed most of the Moslem
ships. When the news reached Constantinople twelve days later, the
ambassadors had no instructions to admit a state of war, or even to
depart. The Turks offered to do anything except openly submit to the
‘ignominy of a connection with the Greeks’, but repudiated the Con-
vention of Akkerman and declared foreign intervention to be con-
trary to Muhammedan law. Thereupon the three ambassadors departed
early in December, and Russia was at war in the spring of 1828. The
other two ambassadors returned in June 1829 and joined Austria and
Prussia in trying to save Turkey from an expected collapse; but the
moderate terms of the Peace of Adrianople were due to the tsar’s
decision of policy combined with the exhaustion of his army.
Had Canning not become prime minister, the Treaty of London would
hardly have been signed in that form; had he lived, it is difficult to
imagine how he could have prevented a Russo-Turkish war, unless by
forcing the Dardanelles and using the British fleet both to coerce
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INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, 1815-30
Turkey and protect her. The problem was too much for the stopgap
government which followed on his death, and too much for Wellington
who took office in January 1828. The Russians were proposing a
temporary occupation of the Danubian Principalities, and a blockade
of the Straits at both ends or — better still, since the three Powers would
be at war with the Porte — ‘ to penetrate even to Constantinople, there to
dictate peace under the walls of the Seraglio The first of these measures
Russia could and did execute alone, occupying the Principalities for
six years; a blockade of the Dardanelles was excluded by British insist-
ence that the Treaty debarred the Russians from making war in the
Aegean; the last measure they attempted alone and nearly achieved
after two campaigns.
Wellington has been accused of indecision, for he had signed the
Protocol without foreseeing all the consequences; but he was not per-
sonally a party to the Treaty and, unless Britain was prepared to join
in a crusade against Turkey (or to make war on Russia instead), his
only weapon was to use delaying tactics: to fulfil the letter of the
treaty towards Russia, but not more, and to settle Greece without
appearing to be a consistent enemy of Turkey. Metternich agreed with
him that a small independent Greece was preferable to a larger Greece
which would perhaps be dependent on Russia. Their calculation was
perhaps niggardly, and coloured by their distaste for the revolutionary
origin of the new State; and, although the minimum execution of the
Treaty was ensured by a French army in the Peloponnese (1828-33), it
was only Russian arms that compelled the sultan to acquiesce by
Article 10 of the Peace of Adrianople (14 September 1829). 1 Neverthe-
less, the Greeks owed much to Canning’s bold initiative in 1826-7,
which also helped British interests by putting an end to six years of
disorder and piracy in the Levant.
For the Habsburg monarchy, the result was less disastrous than
Metternich had expected. Within four years, he reached at Miinchen-
gratz (September 1833) an understanding with Russia over the Balkans,
which partly restored the nucleus of the conservative Alliance for the
next twenty years. Little has been said in this survey about Prussia,
which appeared generally to follow in the wake of Austria. Berlin was
as anxious as Vienna not to quarrel openly with Russia, having an even
stronger common interest in keeping the Poles quiet. For the rest,
Prussia was fully occupied in digesting her recently acquired provinces
and quietly consolidating her influence in north Germany. It happened
that the chief trouble-spots since 1815 were Mediterranean or Atlantic
and not directly interesting to a power without a navy. But it may be
1 For a brief summary of the settlement of Greece to 1 832, and of the effects of the Peace
generally, see Chapter XIX, pp. 550-1. For Wellington’s policy, see Crawley, op. cit.,
chs. 8-12.
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WAR AND PEACE IN AN AGE OF UPHEAVAL
no accident that in August 1829 the Prussian government took one of its
few initiatives by sending a general as mediator to help the tsar in
coming to terms with the sultan at Adrianople, at a moment when
Europe thought that the Russians might soon be in Constantinople.
The Bourbon government in France was disappointed that the eastern
crisis in 1829 did not produce a general revision of the Vienna settlement,
but it cannot be said that foreign policy was a cause of the fall of Charles
X in 1830. In fifteen years France had recovered her status among the
continental Powers and had marched into Spain with their blessing
though not in their names; with Britain and Russia she had taken part
for Greece at Navarino and occupied the Peloponnese in the name of
this ‘splinter’ alliance; and finally, on the eve of revolution at home, she
had begun the conquest of Algeria, alone and in the face of strong British
disapproval (Volume X, p. 427). That did nothing to save the regime,
but Louis Philippe, unlike Louis XVIII, was not handicapped at the
start by the shadow of defeat: his difficulty would be to steer a course
between self-assertion and restraint in Europe.
Since 1815, the ‘conservative Alliance’ of the Great Powers had been
active for about four years, sick for as long again and moribund by
1825; from 1826-7 a separate triple alliance for a specific purpose had
made its full revival impossible. ‘Holy Alliances’, whether of kings or
peoples, were more easily conceived in the early nineteenth century
than before 1789, and the dissemination of ideas was quicker and more
widespread; but, in practice, governments were not so uniformly
conservative, nor peoples so uniformly revolutionary, as to justify an
ideological conflict in such simple terms. Statesmen continued to
invoke the ‘Concert of Europe’, and used it to settle without war the
affairs of Belgium in 1830-2 and of the Levant in 1839-41. The ‘Con-
cert’ after 1830, like the Alliance of 1814-20, had the effect of preserving
a balance of power, but with less hostility to internal changes and rather
more readiness to recognise accomplished facts. It was not, any more
than the Alliance, a plan for a supra-national direction of Europe. The
problems of governments and peoples were too diverse to be settled by
a single formula. An international organisation for preserving peace,
difficult at any time, would hardly prosper so long as peoples were in
vastly differing stages of development or so long as the prospect of
general war did not appear to be in all cases wholly suicidal.
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APPENDIX
NOTE ON THE FRENCH REPUBLICAN CALENDAR
This calendar was proposed on 20 September 1793 and adopted on 5 October,
(with amendments 24 November), retrospectively as from 22 September 1792,
the date of the foundation of the Republic; but for this reason it was never used for
the year I. Each month had 30 days. In each month there were three decades
of 10 days each; the days were Primedi, Duodi, Tridi, Quartidi, Quintidi, Sextidi,
Septidi, Octidi, Novidi and Decadi, the last being the official day of rest. At the
end of each year five days were added, called jours complementaires or sansculottides;
and a sixth, called jour de la Revolution, was added at the end of each year preceding
a leap year (including the year VII, preceding 1 800, which was not a leap year in the
Gregorian calendar). Consequently, the republican years began on varying dates in
September according to the Gregorian calendar, and the succeeding months also.
For this reason it is impossible to give concisely a complete concordance, but that
will be found in P. Caron, Manuel pratique pour V etude de la Revolution frangaise
(1912), pp. 221-69; or (for the years H-VIII only) in the 1947 edition, pp. 281-6.
The following tables show the dates covered by each year, and the order of the
months, which began on dates varying between the 18th and the 24th.
Years Months
[an I
22 Sept. 1792-21 Sept. 1793]
Vendemiaire
Sept.-Oct.
an II
22 Sept. 1793-21 Sept. 1794
Brumaire
Oct.-Nov.
an III
22 Sept. 1794-22 Sept. 1795
Frimaire
Nov.-Dee.
an IV
23 Sept. 1795-21 Sept. 1796
Nivose
Dee.-Jan.
an V
22 Sept. 1796-21 Sept. 1797
Pluviose
Jan.-Feb.
an VI
22 Sept. 1797-21 Sept. 1798
Ventose
Feb.-March
an VH
22 Sept. 1798-22 Sept. 1799
Germinal
March-April
an VIII
23 Sept. 1799-22 Sept. 1800
Floreal
April-May
an IX
23 Sept. 1800-22 Sept. 1801
Prairial
May-June
an X
23 Sept. 1801-22 Sept. 1802
Messidor
June-July
an XI
23 Sept. 1802-23 Sept. 1803
Thermidor
July-August
an XII
24 Sept. 1803-22 Sept. 1804
Fructidor
August-Sept.
an XIII
23 Sept. 1804-22 Sept. 1805
an XIV
23 Sept. 1805-
Each day of the year was also given a separate name, taken from plants and fruits
useful to man, domestic animals, agricultural implements or products used in
agriculture. Article 1 1 of the decree provided that each day was to contain ten hours,
each hour 100 ‘decimal minutes’ and each minute 100 ‘decimal seconds’. A
‘decimal clock’ was presented to the Convention and placed beneath the tribune
under a bust of Marat. But this part of the decree was never put into effect. That
the calendar had not only a civic and republican flavour but also a didactic purpose
(as part of the programme of ‘dechristianisation’) is evident from the speeches
recorded in the Archives Parlementaires for 20 September; 5, 6, 18, 24 October;
5, 7, 24 November 1793. It was remarked that the inauguration of the Republic
(22 September 1792) and of the reign of Equality had coincided with the equinox,
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APPENDIX
when the sun’s rays shone equally on the two poles. It was on io November 1793
that the Convention received at the bar a deputation of sansculottes demanding
the suppression of state stipends for the clergy and bringing with them a classically
draped actress impersonating Liberty. The Convention accompanied the procession
back to the former Cathedral of Notre Dame in order to show their approval to the
people and to sing a hymn to Liberty there.
With the Concordat in April 1802, Sunday was officially restored as the day of
rest, and the republican calendar had long ceased to be commonly used when the
Gregorian calendar was restored by law as from 1 January 1806 (1 1 Nivose, an XTV.)
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